The exhibition series Entry_Exit originated by the Viennese artist-run gallery Flat1 will continue in Helsinki at the gallery Oksasenkatu 11 24.5.-9.6.2013. Entry_Exit is a continuation to the group show of five Finnish artists Minna Kangasmaa, Roope Ahola, Eija Hirvonen, Tuomo Kangasmaa and Kari Yli-Annala in Flat1 that took place in 2012. The exhibition in Helsinki is a part of a series of exhibitions that have been organized in collaboration with different artist groups in Austria, France and Switzerland. The Entry_Exit exhibition is collaboration with the artist collective Oksasenkatu 11, and it comprises of two distinct shows: the exhibition of Austrian artists,
We are the crisis 23.-26.5.2013 and
Besides Beauty 1.-9.6.2013, by Finnish artists that was previously exhibited in Vienna.
Besides Beauty
Minna Kangasmaa, Roope Ahola, Eija Hirvonen, Tuomo Kangasmaa and Kari Yli-Annala
Besides Beauty is a series of exhibitions by five Finnish visual artists. Exhibitions include photographs, videos, installations and performances. The first Besides Beauty exhibition was presented in Vienna in 2012.
The starting point for our collaboration has been illuminated words by Swiss writer
Robert Walser (1878-1956). Our exhibition Besides Beauty discusses the new and the wonderful between things. What do we think of when we see something exceptional or how ordinary turns strange as we look at or concentrate on it long enough? How ordinary can be a subject of transformation and transmission and also to engender new connections even a subject and materials remain same? Potentially, time or the experience of time transforms the thing into the other thing, the fact into the fiction, the natural into the unnatural, or we get used into what we thought unnatural. What kind of thing functions as a variable? What is the act that transforms the thing to be transformed? Maybe, a place, a location, a human being or a sound? These are the things we are thinking about.
Robert Walser (1878 - 1956): On Staging Lies
We are living now in a peculiar time, though all times may perhaps have had their own timely peculiarities. Indeed, this time of ours strikes me as highly, highly peculiar, especially when—as I am doing just now—I place one finger alongside my nose so as to reflect upon the actual nature of this life that we are now forcefully thrusting and squeezing onto the stage. We give the stage life to eat, and it appears to be well fed. Even the most obscure, sequestered dramatist presents the theater with his scraps of obscure, sequestered life. If things continue at such a clip, life will soon be lying on its back like a consumption-wracked crone, sucked and pumped dry to the ribs, while the theater will be as plump, portly, and stuffed full as, say, an engineer who’s struck gold with his patented enterprises and is now in a position to allow himself all the pleasures the world affords.
The stage needs life! True enough, but plague and pox confound it, where is all this good, wholesome, veritable life supposed to come from? From life, no? But then is life really so inexhaustible? In my view it is inexhaustible only insofar as we let it keep on following its natural course—tranquil, fluid, and broad - like an untamed, beautiful river. But it may soon appear incontrovertible that we erudite numskulls are merely exploiting and pummeling life, no longer its natural children. It’s as if life were a large, dusty carpet that now, in this age of ours, is to be hung out and given a good whacking. Even dentists who’ve gone to see Lulu have begun to study the features and muscles of life as though it were necessary to cut open an old cadaver and hurl pieces of it onto the stage.
Here’s the thing: the more vivid and natural things look at the theater, the more anxious, guarded, vexed , and upholstered things will appear in everyday life. When the stage bangs out its truths, it exerts an intimidating influence; when, however, it spins out golden, idealized falsehoods in an oversize, unnaturally beautiful form—as it used to do at least a little in former eras—the effect of this is provocative and heartening, it fosters the beautiful, crass vulgarities of life. Then we can say we’ve been to the theater and luxuriated in a foreign, noble, beautiful, gentle world. Watch out with those unbridled nature plays of yours, lest life trickle away unawares. I’m all for a theater of lies, Lord help me.
Robert Walser, On staging lies in Robert Walser Berlin Stories (2012)
Welcome to the opening of the exhibition on Friday 31st of May at 6 p.m.
www.oksasenkatu11.fi