¾¿À22 Kiasma, Helsinki 8 April – 16 October
The Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, part of the Finnish National Gallery, has a Documenta-inspired contemporary art survey that has been running since 1961. ¾¿À22, the tenth edition, is themed Living Encounters, and posits an overarching postpandemic vision of social fragmentation. It showcases 55 artists and artist groups, with 15 new commissions, and for the first time includes historical work from previous editions. (The last two editions have focused on Africa, 2011, and the digital turn, 2017.)
Several of these older works bear contemporary relevance in relation to ecological disaster or health crises. Kimmo Kaivanto’s seemingly idyllic painting of waterlilies, When the Sea Dies (1973), became a Áâãàäåpostcard symbol of eutrophication, and Lewis Baltz’s Docile Bodies (1994) are lifesize images of hospitalised bodies in France at a time in which ¾AE½À was raging. But rather than highlighting a kind of social anomie, the thread that comes through is a strong sense of rupture with nonhuman worlds. In Annika Eriksson’s video I am the dog that was always here (2013), originally commissioned for the 13th Istanbul Biennial, a neighbourhood in the Turkish city that was razed to the ground is overrun by abandoned dogs who, via a voiceover narrator, speak in poetic aphorisms. Anni Puolakka’s video installation Oestrus (2020) tells an unsettling narrative of a woman’s unrequited love for horses next to sculptures of clothed centaurs with manelike hair. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s video installation My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires (2017) is a disturbing tale of endangered animals told from the perspective of an extinct Javan rhino and a turtle as they debate overthrowing humans.
Other parts of the exhibition gesture towards the complications of cultural otherness, including Farah Al Qasimi’s wallpaper collage that juxtaposes images of women performing the Á¾Ã’S national hair-flipping dance with images of lurid lights on display in Dubai’s Dragon-mart (self-touted as the ‘largest
Chinese retail trading market’ outside mainland China). Slavs and Tatars present Prayway (2012), a Persian carpet for people to rest on with a view of Helsinki’s Mannerheim statue, commemorating a Finnish Civil War general, through the window. Placed next to the collective’s open-mouth diagram detailing where Arabic, Cyrillic and Hebrew phonemes are articulated (Mother Tongues and Father Throats, 2012), it seems to index divergences and convergences in oral and material cultures. Sol Calero’s El Autobús (2019) – an ornate bus representing everyday public transport in Latin America, on which is cheerfully painted ‘viajes paraíso’ (paradise travel) – exaggerates cultural clichés. Inside, º» screens show lush landscape vistas from Latin America and play a voiceover simulating a tourguide of fictional sites. Telling of haunted lakes, watermelons growing in the desert and a necropolis of unearthed bones, this magical-realist narrative is couched within ‘facts’ about indigenous architecture, liberation movements, telenovelas and conspiracy
theories – humorous in a heavy-handed way. Another site-specific commission, International Rock Art Red, drawn from felt blankets (2022), by D Harding, a descendant of Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal First Peoples of Australia, was a gesture towards Aboriginal land art in natural ochre and the transportation of pigments. But on Kiasma’s white modernist walls, it feels less than successful.
The global gaze of ¾¿À22 also touches on issues of womanhood, with works such as Wild Song (2021–22), Iraqi traditional handstitched textiles of nude, pregnant and beheaded female figures by Helsinki-based Iraqi artist Kholod Hawash. In contrast, Laure Prouvost’s From the Depth of Our Heart To the Depth of The See (2022) is a red-tinged heated room screening caregiving mothers who murmur a popular children’s song in the sauna, referencing the place where Finnish women would historically give birth. Luscious closeups of underwater scenes, sweat and flesh enfolded by tentacular sea creatures intimate a more fluid eroticism. Frida Orupabo’s digital cutouts of archival photos lends the exhibition a poignant gaze on women of colour and untold histories, as does Grada Kilomba’s theatrical video Illusions Vol. , Antigone (2019), enacting a feminist version of the Greek tragedy with dance, performed to African song by composer Neo Muyanga. The script tells a postcolonial story of how even gender-based narratives can usurp Black visibility and the rights to historical memory.
¾¿À, which initially emerged from a fear of cultural insularity due to the Cold War, is now shifting attention to its own history – hence the inclusion here of a 1968 Francis Bacon painting that was shown as part of ¾¿À69, and a 1972 Alex Katz painting from ¾¿À74. Some of the strongest works enact that attempt of creating a cultural history, such as the ongoing Girjegumpi / Sámi Architectural Library by Joar Nango, a living, movable archive of architectural research and nomadism in Sámi culture, and Joel Slotte’s photorealist paintings of disaffected youth, paganism and hallucinogenic plants in Finland. There are also three outstanding 1978 performance videos by pioneering Finnish artist Mervi Kytösalmibuhl, who studied under Nam June Paik. In Pflaster/haut, she layers her face with bandages, and then tears them off. Her videos are contextualised alongside other durational performance works of historical significance, such as Marina Abramović and Ulay’s Nightsea
Crossing (1981–87), their six-year endurance experiments of silence, stillness and fasting (one of which was performed in ¾¿À83) and Howardena Pindell’s first videowork, Free, White and 21 (1980), detailing her everyday stories of racism.
Given the theme of the exhibition, perhaps it is no surprise that the performative works stand out, with 14 live performances from the likes of rising performance-art star Alexandra Pirici and culminating with the 2019 Golden Lion-winning Sun & Sea performance
˙ by composer Lina Lapelyte, librettist
˙ ˙ ˙ Vaiva Grainyte and director Rugile Barzdžiukaite. But the greatest performance of them all is the absence of an artwork by Russian artist Evgeny Antufiev, who instead printed the message ‘No War’ on the wall, expressing the hope that a different work could be installed when the war against Ukraine ended. Today’s living encounters, ¾¿À suggests, are both kaleidoscopic and provocatively elusive.
Nadine Khalil
Kiasma has since become embroiled in a controversy over the institution’s funding’s links to the arms trade and connections to the repression of Palestine