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?”
”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.”
”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?”
”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?”
”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?”
”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.”
”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.”
”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?”
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.
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.