ARS 06 Sense of the Real
21.1-27.8.06 Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki
For decades, ARS show has been the best Finland could offer in terms of global contemporary art. It started off as an effort to educate Finns on the recent developments in the international art scene, but with globalization of Finland it developed conceptually into a sharply provocative, debate-raising event. However, this year’s edition of ARS demonstrates a radically different approach.
Just today, the great Mummi-mamma, the woman-president Tarja Halonen almost lost presidential elections to a Conservative candidate, narrowly making it with less then 2% majority. This has come as no surprise – the general mood in Finland is becoming more conservative, and it is only logical for this process to be reflected in the institutional art scene as well. After today’s election results all my questions about why a major independent public art museum in Finland would try to pretend to be a commercial art gallery disappeared completely.
One of the central themes in ARS 06 is the idea of paradise. To make this point as clear as possible, the museum space is rich on works featuring nature in all its forms and manifestations - it’s been quite a while since I saw a show with so many animals in it. The exhibition is a straight and rather uneventful trip between the two opposites - it all starts with swans flying across Kiasma lobby towards a Swan Lake (Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger’s work), where they contemplate shrubs and rubbish of human civilization together with a bunch of other animals (I’m not kidding) and ends with Genesis according to parrots, a video installation by Sergio Vega, featuring parrots discussing Genesis and colonialism. But, of course, paradise is lost, and anyway how would we distinguish paradise without the other extreme. Se on closer look every idyllic scene reveals signs of decay, entropy, and corruption. Nasty-looking intestines spill out from perfectly geometric wall tiles in Adriana Varejao’s installations, Kent Henricksen alters bucolic rococo embroideries by adding objects from S&M and Ku Klux Klan , and then there is even more embroidery by Angelo Filomeno with his trademark luxurious horror scenes. The spectator is invited to consider Buddist tradition of paradise as an inner refuge and meditation (Monti Toembolsat, Tabaimo, Shu-Min Lin), lost paradise in Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Thomas Nordanstad video from abandoned Hashima island, seemingly unavoidable paradise of Japanese cyber-punk fairies (Motohiko Odani), etc.
Most of the works on the show seem to share simple “one thought-one work” unambiguous approach, and gallery-like craftiness. All in all, the choice of works follows the conservative themes of the exhibition. As Kiasma Museum director Tuula Karjalainen puts it in foreword to the exhibition catalogue, “we no longer have an absolute certainty of right and wrong, everything has become so complicated and very relative”. Exactly.
From the works that stand out, can be mentioned Mark Raidpere’s video that we have seen last year in Estonian pavilion in Venice, an exceptionally absorbing piece portraying 10 convicts; Charles Sandison’s media installation that creates its own linguistic world; The 1st Complaints Choir of Birmingham by Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta, who amazingly enough succeeded in uniting catharses of creating art and complaining.
During the opening, Roi Vaara showed his new performance, The Golden Handshake, where the artist was shaking hands with the public, living small flecks of gold on their hands. The image of Finnish Parliament served as a background for this performance.