studio act

HIAP Studio Act! Production Residencies 2009 –2012

Bettina Wind Alexandra Ferreira

Germany, 15.4.–15.6.2010

About the artists: Alexandra Ferreira and Bettina Wind (windferreira) live and work in Berlin, Germany. Alexandra Ferreira studied visual arts at the Art Academy (E.S.T.G.A.D.) in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal, Bettina Wind graduated in dramaturgy and European literature at the LMU University and Theatre Academy Munich, Germany.

Alexandra Ferreira and Bettina Wind started to work in partnership in 2006, when founding the State of Translocality, a series of installations and interventions that reflect on subjective experiences of “translocal workers” and the impacts of transnational work structures on urban space. Each collaborative work of windferreira is set in a specific location and context that function as a backdrop for experimentations with media and narration. A major part of windferreira’s projects is developed in the frame of artistic residencies, e.g. at VanAbbe Museum in Eindhoven, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, HIAP in Helsinki and Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt am Main. Other works respond to particular surroundings, such as a decommissioned terminal at Cork Airport, a warehouse building in Dallas or a modernist façade of the city gallery in Lisbon. Departing from particular objects, such as an enigmatic technical device found in a theatre depot, a dance video recorded in low quality, or a cactus originating from the US-Mexican border zone, the artists explore ways to construct semi-fictional narratives and multi-faceted relations between objects and viewers. The final works involve a variety of media: video and sound, printed matter, performance, drawing and photography. http://windferreira.blogspot.com Production during the Helsinki residency: No Past Today, Newspaper in Offset Print, 24 pages, 800 copies.

Developed during a residency at HIAP, Helsinki, supported by Goethe-Institut Finland, distributed in Helsinki, Porto, Tallinn, Eindhoven and Berlin.

Launch event at the Goethe-Institut Finland and the artists’ space Oksasenkatu11, in June 2010.

No Past Today is conceived as a futuristic culture magazine tackling issues that workers in the art and culture field will be confronted with in 2020. Based on interviews on the situation in Helsinki today, current questions and dynamics are projected into a future to offer a translocal perspective for the Finnish art scene. The work was inspired by the documentary Pour que la guerre s'achève, les murs devaient s'écrouter (1980) by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, a portrait of a former industrial worker and political activist, who during years wrote and distributed his own newspaper, reporting on work conditions and calling for a general strike that never happened.

Residency in collaboration with the Goethe Institute in Helsinki.

Bettina Wind Alexandra Ferreira

Launch event at the artist-run space Oksasenkatu11.

All images by windferreira

First draft of newspaper in HIAP studio

Draft of final page

Cover of No Past Today

Mathilde ter Heijne Netherlands, 4–16.1.2010 19.7.–22.8.2010 About the artist: Mathilde ter Heijne (* 1969 in Strasbourg) is a Dutch artist who lives since many years in Berlin. She works in a wide range of media such as installation, video, sculpture and performance. Her work examines social, cultural, political, and economic backgrounds of gender-specific phenomena in different societies and cultures. Political, structural and physical violence in connection with existing power relations within society and how to deal with them are the starting point for a series of video works in which the artist uses life-size dummies. In parallel, ter Heijne examines and analyzes in these studies her role within the artist's own structural framework. In Helsinki she realized an open workshop of www.terheijne.net Production during the Helsinki residency: Lament, 2010, single screen video, HDDV / 5:05 min / 16:9 During her stay at the HIAP residency Mathilde ter Heijne did research on oral culture in Finland, more specific on the lament tradition, and organized a workshop on Suomenlinna for which the lament singer Pirkko Fihlman was invited to teach the ancient techniques of lamenting. Part of the workshop took place at the Karelian Pentinotsa house in the open-air museum Seurasaari, Helsinki.

Lament is an age-old oral tradition that combines singing and weeping. All over the world, women traditionally sang these songs at traditional moments in life such as funerals and weddings, upon the departure of a loved one going off to war, or simply to commiserate about the hardships of life. The lament ritual is used to express sorrow and grief, to heal hurts and traumas, and to bridge the past with the present in order to forge ahead into the future. The video LAMENT produced together with Finnish filmmaker Ramy Ramezan and canadian filmmaker Kara Blake is the result of this project.

Mathilde ter Heijne

Mathilde ter Heijne, Any Day Now, publication produced on the occasion of the exhibition Any Day Now in Kunsthalle N端rnberg, Lentos Kunstmuseum, 2011

Mathilde ter Heijne

Lament, 2010, video

Lament, 2010

Mathilde ter Heijne

Lament, 2010 single screen video HDDV / 5:05 min / 16:9

Natalie Bewernitz & Marek Goldowski Germany / Poland, May and October 2010

in collaboration with Cartes Flux Festival of New Media Art About the artists: Natalie Bewernitz and Marek Goldowski (Germany/Poland) are working since 2000 as an artist duo with a focus on field recordings, spatial electro-acoustic audio compositions and video installations. Both studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. In 2007 they finished a six-month artist residency at Location One, New York. Their works have been shown domestically and internationally in places such as the Chelsea Art Museum New York, 798 Art Festival Beijing, the ISEA Singapore 2008, Siggraph Asia 2009 Yokohama and Kunstverein Tiergarten Galerie Nord Berlin. www.bewernitzgoldowski.com Production and exhibition during the Helsinki residency: UNVEILED PRESENCE (secret sounds 3) HD-Video with multichannel sound, 2010.

In their long-term project UNVEILED PRESENCE (secret sounds) started in 2006/2007 in New York City, the media artist duo Natalie Bewernitz and Marek Goldowski are exploring characteristic sounds and acoustic properties of the city of Helsinki. The investigations are expanding in the areas of airborne sound and solid-borne vibrations. The project is inspired by the readymade À bruit secret (With hidden sound) created in 1916 in New York by Marcel Duchamp.

During the month of May 2010 they used measurement equipment like laservibrometry for capturing hidden vibrations of found objects and places through rays of light. As a first step the material will be arranged to an atmospheric audiovisual installation.

The work made part of Cartes Flux –festival in 2010 and was installed at WeeGee Culture Center in Espoo.

During the period of 27.5.–10.7.2011 UNVEILED PRESENCE (secret sounds) presence was shown in Neues Kunstforum, Köln, Germany.

Natalie Bewernitz / Marek Goldowski

UNVEILED PRESENCE (secret sounds 4)

UNVEILED PRESENCE (secret sounds 3), at Cartes Flux Festival of New Media Art 2010, EMMA, Espoo

Natalie Bewernitz / Marek Goldowski

UNVEILED PRESENCE (secret sounds 4) at Neues Kunstforum Cologne, Germany, 2011

Wagner Morales Brasil,12.1.– 4.4.2010

About the artist: Wagner Morales is a Brazilian artist from São Paulo who likes movies and doesn’t care about soccer or carnival. Graduated in Anthropology, he started to work with film just right after college. Since them, his practice has been concentrated on visual and sound media and he has done some projects on video, music, installation and photography. He never worked as an anthropologist.

Exhibition during the Helsinki residency: White Screen projects scenes from Western films on snow Films start with white. The first image of a film is always a white screen.

"In my mental image of Finland, the country is a place where, for the best part of the year and throughout most of the winter, the landscape is covered with snow. A gigantic white surface. Hence the title of this exhibition: White Screen", says the Brazilian artist Wagner Morales (b. 1971). While on Suomenlinna, as part of HIAP’s production residence programme, Morales has made a new work to be shown at the Cable Gallery 1.4.–18.4.2010.

The idea behind this project is to use this immense natural screen and, literally, to project selected scenes from ‘cowboy movies’ onto it. This Hollywood genre explored the relationship between man and his surroundings, revealing human attempts to domesticate the inhospitable, to turn the inhabitable into a home. For Morales, these films share certain similarities with artistic works in open spaces.

wagner morales

White Screen, Mountain, 2010, 40 x 120 cm

wagner morales

White Screen, The End, 2010, 40 x 120 cm

White Screen, Sheriff, 2010, 40 x 120 cm

Four photographs from the White Screen series belong to the collection of Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki.

White Screen, Johnny, 2010, 40 x 120 cm

Guillaume Paris France, Several shorter periods of time between September 2010 and August 2012 About the artist: Over the last fifteen years Guillaume Paris has evolved a diverse practice that focuses, from an anthropological standpoint, on the use and abuse of meaning and identity in contemporary culture. The work examines the powerful ideological forces that shape modern society, especially their more curious elements such as the persistence of quasi magical forms of thinking in the discourse of both consumer fetishism and Western politics that combine to form our 'new world order'.

At their core, these interests lead Paris to explore notions of the ideal and the rhetoric of purity that underlie all these discourses: from politics to religion, via advertising and marketing. As part of that critique of purity Paris positively engages with ideas of change and adaptability, in conceptions of heterogeneity, transience and tolerance.

In keeping with these concerns Paris produces exhibitions that define a very particular kind of space. Structurally diverse, often they combine works executed in different media that apparently address different subjects. Paris creates spaces that are opposed to any form of essentialism and do not lend themselves to any synthetic closure. Instead they provoke critical engagement and, at times, a more emotional response to the vast flow of artefacts and ideas that structure and mediate the world we inhabit. www.guillaumeparis.com Production during the Helsinki residency: Bad Anima -- Video (Color) From below the surface of a still lake in Finland, an ominous creature made of hair slowly emerges. It levitates above the surface like a ghostly apparition. It then returns back down to the depths of the lake. The lake becomes still once more.

The film has been shot in August 2012.

Guillaume PARIS

Guillaume PARIS

Guillaume PARIS

Guillaume PARIS

Bad Anima, 2012 Photo by Yuko Sakurai Courtesy of the artist

Anna Hallin & Olga Bergmann Iceland, 1.7.–31.8.2010 About the artists: Anna Hallin (b. 1965 in Olofström) and Olga Bergmann (b. 1967 in Reykjavik) live and work in Reykjavik, Iceland. Hallin & Bergmann share a mutual interest in evolution, biology, genetics, ecosystems and social behavior and have since 2003 collaborated on several projects, mainly video works. They have also participated in various “architectural” projects and competitions in collaboration with the architects of Arkibúllan in Iceland.

Olga and Anna work in a variety of media - animation, photography, video, sculpture, drawing, installation and soundscapes. In their collaborative work they have for instance placed fake nature films and displays of fictional natural history “objects” among authentic scientific exhibits like at The Icelandic Seal Centre and The Natural History Museum in Iceland.

The video based installation project “DRIFT” that they started working on at their HIAP residency in 2010 will be shown at The National Gallery in Iceland in October 2012. http://this.is/ahallin/ http://this.is/olga/ Production during the Helsinki residency: “DRIFT” Continental drifting gone astray...? DRIFT is a collaboration between artists Anna Hallin and Olga Bergmann. DRIFT is a video based installation that among other things focuses on national identity in relation to geology.

An inflatable model of Iceland that also looks like a simple organism departs on a journey and it is uncertain whether this entity belongs within Europe, with the USA or perhaps neither. Interlaced in the work is a dialogue with Finnish mineralogist - professor Joffi Eklund, animations depicting geological phenomena as well as documentation of the “interaction” of this inflatable landmass with people, animals and natural forces.

This work is greatly inspired by aspects of geohistory and geomorphology – how in some strata and landscape ancient similarities and connections can be found between countries that today belong to distant continents and if one can then assume that countries have a geomorphic “identity” and in that way some countries have more in common than others; there is for instance a large chunk of Finland that now is a part of Brazil and Iceland used to be part of a “bridge” between N-America and Europe.This is also interesting when reflecting upon how much geography and placement in reality shapes our own identity.

It is intriguing to imagine all this shifting and drifting of landmasses as a “time lapse” sequence the most commonly used special effect in nature films to show something in a few moments that in reality takes weeks or months.In this work Hallin & Bergmann toy with a “movable” landmass, a symbol for an island/country that departs on an uncertain journey. Some things are easier to scrutinize by shrinking eternity into a short story and the continents drift at the same speed as our nails grow or approximately 2 cm a year.

Olga Bergmann and Anna Hallin

Drift, MADE IN CHINA, 2010 Photo by Hallin & Bergmann

Drift, 2010 Photo by Hallin & Bergmann

Drift, 2010 Photo by Hallin & Bergmann

Drift, 2010 Photo by Oliver Whitehead

Yoshinori Niwa Japan, 1.2.–31.3.2010

About the artist: Yoshinori Niwa (b.1982) is a performance/intervention artist. He graduated from Tama Art University department of moving image and performing arts in 2005. He realizes performances or projects to intervene into society. Previous exhibitions are Complex Circuit, gallery alpha m, Tokyo 2010 and Communicating with Thieves, HIAP Project Room, Helsinki 2010. He has been on a production residency at HIAP-Helsinki International Artist Programme (Finland) in winter 2010. Further, Niwa is a curator and festival organizer. He is currently coordinating an international art festival titled “Artist as Activist” in Tokyo.

Exhibition during the Helsinki residency: Intervention project encourages people to think about resistance to global capitalism Japanese artist Yoshinori Niwa (b.1982) is creating new site-specific works in Helsinki during his HIAP production residency. Communicating with Thieves is a temporary, site-specific installation that imagines a relationship with a real thief. On aika varastaa! / It’s time to steal! slogans are projected onto the walls of several bank buildings on Saturday, March 27, at 7.30 pm–11 pm.

People seeing these signs can imagine any scale of bank robbery or theft from governing authorities and global capitalism, as an act of resistance in their imagination. This can be seen as resistance that speaks to the private-property system, since ‘wealth’ in all fields belongs to somebody from the low-income working class. The bank-robbery slogan symbolizes the fact that action is possible. But it cannot make people act. Nevertheless, thinking about money and the economy from the point of view of an outlaw bank-robber could trigger a change in the world.

Seppo Renvall is assisting Niwa to realize the projections.

Oliver Whitehead will document the projections. His photographs will be seen also in Niwa’s exhibition in HIAP Project Room.

Previously Yoshinori Niwa has been interested in how we communicate with others, including animals and plants, and in historical existence. Living my life is choosing what I believe and how I can involve others in every community, so that human society is part of the making of history.

These are the most important elements for my artworks, says Niwa.

Communicating with Thieves,2010 Performance Video 4’54 min Photographic Print 1200 x 1200mm Photo by Oliver Whitehead

Interview with Yoshinori Niwa in Esitys-magazine, Finland, Jan /2010, p. 18–19 http://www.todellisuus.fi/

Fatmir Mustafa "Dracula and Frankenstein are the best friends"

Fatmir Mustafa, Kosovo,1.9.–30.11.2009 About the artist: Fatmir Mustafa works mainly with site-specific installations and interventions. His practice aims to question the mediocracies often embedded within societies and to create situations auspicious for critical insight: “My work seeks to penetrate into the social and political paradoxes that occur within my locality: Finding and morphing into any medium that complies momentarily with the situations or topics best suiting my work ethic. Often I find myself possessing an impulsive expression that reflects and relates toward social or institutional hypocrisy, which affects my integrity as an individual and artist. My initial instinct is to loudly respond towards situations revealing and unearthing imposed rigid conditioning. Forever questioning and confronting, frequently challenging what is considered as the most obvious. Always channeling a firm, direct and blunt approach.”

Production and exhibition during the Helsinki residency: His work "Dracula and Frankenstein are the best friends" was shown in HIAP Project Room from October 20 until November 6, 2009.

ULLA TAIPALE / CAPSULA Spain, 1.2.2009–31.3.2009 About the artists: curators: Capsula was founded by Mónica Bello Bugallo and Ulla Taipale in 2005 in Barcelona. It is a platform that creates cultural content and curatorial projects dealing with art, science and nature.

In the summer of 2008, curatorial research group Capsula embarked on the first of its Curated Expeditions, demonstrating in the process that you don't need an intergalactic spaceship to uncover new territories and make meaningful discoveries.The series of Curated Expeditions are research trips that engage with earthly phenomena through artistic investigation.

Because Capsula´s latest focus is on the relation between art, biology and environmental culture, the expeditions go hand in hand with a more leisurely and sometimes old-fashioned philosophy of travel: walking, bob-sleighing, swimming, hitchhiking, rowing, sailing, trains and submarines. The journey from Finland to Novosibirsk took several days; while Tommi chose to hitch-hike, curator Ulla Taipale, Agnes Meyer-Brandis and Mireia C. Saladrigues spent three days to get there by train, taking the romantic-sounding Trans-Siberian train-line. http://00capsula00.wordpress.com Production and exhibition during the Helsinki residency: Expedition to the Total Eclipse in Kiasma Mediatheque, 7.3.–6.7.2009 Capsula’s cross-disciplinary expeditions, straddling the borderline between art and science, study and marvel at natural phenomena through personal experience. The first expedition was made in summer 2008 to Siberia, where the total eclipse of the Sun could be observed. The base of the expedition was set up at the Novosibirsk Zoo, from which it continued on to the Altai wilderness and all the way to the Moon.

Travelling slow, using methods of transport that only moderately burden the environment, is a key aspect of the expeditions.

Can natural phenomena and the spectacles of nature still fascinate people in a modern world, saturated by video games and action movies? And can these splendid and thrilling emotions experienced in nature shift the attitude of people to a more respectful and caring direction concerning their environment? Organised in collaboration with Pixelache.

ULLA TAIPALE / CAPSULA

Jota Izquierdo Spain/Mexico, with curator Manuel Cirauqui, Spain, December 2010 and January 2011

About the artist: Jota Izquierdo produced his exhibition Region 4 in Cable Gallery during his residency with the help of a Spanish curator Manuel Ciraqui (in connection to Izquierdo’s residency in one month curatorial residency in HIAP).

The exhibition made part of the artist’s ongoing project Capitalismo Amarillo, which has since then travelled also to one of the international biennales: Manifesta 9, open until September 30, 2012, in Belgium. www.capitalismoamarillo.net Production and exhibition during the Helsinki residency: Jota Izquierdo Investigates Yellow Capitalism in Mexico Cable Gallery 6.–21.1.2011 In his new set of works Region 4 Jota Izquierdo (b. in Castellón, Spain, 1972) presents a selection of documents and materials gathered and/or created throughout a wide-ranging research on the Mexican black market. Under the notion of capitalismo amarillo – yellow capitalism this multi-leveled project takes up and carries with it the forms of representation and underground cultural practices that spread from the renowned Tepito market in Mexico City to the rest of the American continent, as well as on a global scale.

Although Jota Izquierdo’s research and analysis focuses on phenomena taking place on a global scale, the epicenter of the Capitalismo Amarillo project is the Tepito street market in Mexico City, from which a profuse variety of unregulated activities emanate in all directions. Known for its dense network of pirate traders, Tepito has earned a reputation for being a wild exchange area where the difference simply vanishes between the legal and the illegal, the authentic and the fake. Jota Izquierdo’s experience as an insider in this market for over two years shows us how wild and sometimes hilarious forms of commerce function as an important platform for cohesion amongst its neighbors and workers. It is a space for wild inventiveness at the core of the wild market society, which has engulfed the globe.

Jota Izquierdo

Jota Izquierdo, Region 4, Exhibition at Cable Gallery 6.–21.1.2011 Photos by Tomasz Szrama

Patrick Jolley Ireland, January and Febraury 2011 About the artist: The work of the late Irish artist Patrick Jolley (b. 1964 in Ireland, d. in January 2012 in India) spans photography, video installation and cinema. Jolley’s films use low tech special effects to articulate those aspects of a place or situation that are present but not visible. The results are dark and melancholic while retaining the possibility of humour.

Jolley’s work has been seen at the 2008 Gwangzhou Triennial, the 2006 Berlin Biennial and the 2009 Tierra del Fuego Biennial. His work is in the collections of several major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art. Patrick Jolley came to a HIAP production residency to realize a film with scenes in a frozen house in the beginning of year 2011. His residency in HIAP was extended to be spent partly in Mustarinda, Hyrynsalmi, where ice and cold are a natural resource at that time of the year, and production of the piece was easier.

Jolley's new work, Freeze, produced during his stay after HIAP was shown in a screening at IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) on May 25, 2012.

Unfortunately HIAP has not been able to get any material of the work produced at the time of the residency, since Patrick Jolley died in India in January 2012.

HIAP 2012