MARIA SAVELA
REVIEWS OF TABULA RASA BY STUDENTS OF THE PRAXIS MASTER’S PROGRAMME UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS HELSINKI 220/
After visiting the two Tabula Rasa exhibitions at MUU Galleria and MUU Kaapeli in Helsinki, Maria Savela, Ulla-Maija Pitkänen, Katariina Timonen and Anastasia Isakova wrote the following reviews. We are deeply thankful to the authors and to Prof. Leevi Haapala and Prof. Pontus Kyander for their interest in this curatorial project.
The sea forms a multivocal narrative in Tabula Rasa, an exhibition that introduces the works of young artists born in the Balearic Islands in the 1980s and 1990s. The sea is present as a distant murmur, as a way to reach individual and collective history, as well as being the subject of scientific research. The exhibition freely sails between personal and societal, between the individual and the environment. It refers to current visual imagery and peels back the layers of history with documentary distinctiveness. The view to the sea from the window of the exhibition space in Helsinki seems to merge with the works on display. The video work of Marijo Ribas is called La mar (2014). The screen is full of small grey envelopes constantly opening and closing. In a digital era, the envelope is still the symbol of incoming messages in many mail browsers. The romanticism of hand-written letters on paper is far away from our everyday deluge of messages and information. The small envelopes fluttering on the screen with the murmur of the sea as their soundscape make a touching impression. At the same time, they refer to an overload of digital communication, to an endless sea of messages. The exhibition leaps delightfully between different kinds of interfaces. Lara Fluxà’s Estudi de Salinitat nº 4 (2014) touches the border between art and science. Water samples of five different seas are displayed in transparent vessels. Above these five screens are placed, connected via wires to the liquids. The luminosity of the screens correlates to a high level of salinity. Transcend (2013), the installation of Julià Panadès, explores the borders between an art work and a ritual. The video work humorously depicts a spiritual ritual. Beside the video there are objects like a statue, a painted piece of wood, a stone and a woven fabric installed as some sort of totemic objects. The theme of maintaining contact with nature is evident. The merry cavalcade of totem objects and spiritual references, however, steals the show. The meaning of the ritual stays obscure. And this seems actually to be the point. The work reflects a feature common in contemporaneity. The collective fumbling of humankind towards correcting drastic errors made in relation to nature is often overshadowed by personal odysseys of self-seeking. The feminism of the group Las tAradas is delicious in its special, bittersweet way. The work ¡Súper Cookies! (2014) makes use of resistance in and by language. A tray of tempting cookies with pink topping form letters and words that are powerful insults directed at the female body. The joyful work appropriates these hurtful expressions and uses them for its own purposes. The exhibition cannot be perceived as a unified wholeness in regards of artists and works selected. It rather opens up glimpses to a variety of approaches. Tabula Rasa does not try to use the pompous voice of a whole generation. Instead, it allows different nuances to be heard, whether they are scientifically laconic, politicizing, loudly screaming, or something between or beyond all this.
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