English edition

Here you can find texts written in English. The texts collected here contain reviews, blogs, essays, etc. about the arts, art research and culture more generally.

Kritiikki

How a Thing is Already Turning into Something Else

”Rääk’s exhibition leads visitors into its own entropy—a controlled chaos and a system of material objects, hard and soft elements, sculptures that can be almost recognized but are mostly strange and disturbing, and smells that defy expectations based on visual perception. […] Morphogenesis is a project of artistic research, articulated in multiple forms: sketches, notes, materials, experiments. But it is also an inhabitable space and a multisensory presentation.”

Anna Jensen
Blogi

I could have worked overtime this weekend, but I was retraining laziness – Artworks and thoughts on our relationship with work

AI: “Some hoped that automation would free people from work. But isn’t it strange how things developed in a different direction? How could humans so easily adopt the working style of a machine?”

Tanja Becher
Kritiikki

SPRING Performing Arts Festival 2024

”The 10 day festival also organized topic talks, creating platforms for conversations about the themes of the festival. This year’s topics were everything but light: climate, war and colonialism, amongst others.”

Tanja Becher
Kritiikki

Art Museum as Ecosystem: Musings on circulation, symbiosis and a sustainable gaze

”What if I encountered the museum as a living ecosystem where you cannot so easily separate one element from another? And how might this symbiotic perspective create a gaze that allows me to see the artworks as living processes connected to my own body?”

Alyssa Coffin
Sivusilmä

Experiments in Viewing: The Dialogical Dance of Art that “Happens”

”I begin to ask myself a question based on one of the curator’s definitions of art as “something that happens to me.” How do I actively show up for this happening? How do I engage in the resonant dialogue of art transpiring in real time? To begin with, how do I sit on the bench or in what manner do I stand? Where and how do I direct my gaze?”

Alyssa Coffin
Kritiikki

Under the Ejaculation Falls

”As the strive for normality and conformity is quite encompassing, one has to ask, how common straightness actually is? If we had more varied and realistic representations of sex and sexuality, would straightness and cisness reveal themselves not as ’normal’ majority experiences, but rather as popular social habits produced culturally?”

Jenna Jauhiainen

The Magic of Queer Sex

”Before I came out and during the early steps of my transition I often thought whether my sex life was going to die off completely. Would anyone – let alone myself – ever see me as desirable? How on earth would I approach, process, and let go of my internalised transphobia? Paradoxically, in my case the answer was to have more sex.”

Mira Aurelia Eskelinen
Kritiikki

A Chosen Story of Hidden Womanhood

”On International Women’s day, the 8th of March, Artipelag of Stockholm opened a new retrospective group exhibition, Signature Women, 100 years of Swedish Art Scene curated by Frida Andersson, Jessica Höglund, Bo Nilsson and Iselin Page. The exhibition presents nearly 350 artworks from Swedish or Sweden-based women from the 1910’s until today.”

Anni Reponen
Kritiikki

Knowledge-speculation During Climate Crises ­- ”When You Say We Belong To The Light We Belong To The Thunder” at Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM)

”There is a stream of exhibition and biennial projects addressing art in an age of the Anthropocene or emphasising art dealing with post-anthropocentric understandings of the world. These discourses seem to be something that every credible art institution must foster to stay relevant. This development is, of course, part of the political debate that attempts to move the current emphasis towards urgencies and threats that the middle class around the westernised world feel most dire. So, the question arises: what is the role of art institutions, curatorial praxis, and exhibition-making in this situation?”

Jussi Koitela
Blogi

Deeper Than Skin – Ed Hardy: Art of the New Tattoo

Furthermore, even though tattoos are an inherently difficult medium to preserve and display without the participation of tattooed individuals themselves, the exhibition used several effectively clever ways to depict them in addition to the two displays shown above. Ceiling projections allowed people to see what tattoos might look like on different parts of their bodies. Another display paired original stencils with photographs of the final tattoos as they appeared on customers.

Nikolai Sadik-Ogli

The Long Goodbye

Film screenings of the National Audiovisual Institute (KAVI) came to a closure at the end of last year at Eerikinkatu’s art deco cinema Orion in Helsinki. The long goodbye took the whole autumn. Maybe the most special event was the Grande finale, the screening of four Italian films that took all night in mid-December.

Landscapes of possibility: Outi Koivisto’s line leads the viewer into undecidability

The pencil descends onto the paper and begins its path. It glides along vast curves, turns around unexpectedly, moves intensely back and forth, and all of a sudden obtains a conscious mind. For a moment it learns the viewer’s language and the mute line transforms into a power line hanging over an alley. The wires […]

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