P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

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2008 Summer

Arctic Hysteria: State of Being

Marketta Seppälä

Salla Tykkä

Power

1999

Courtesy the artist and Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris/New York

Marcus Copper

Kursk (detail)

2004

Courtesy Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation

Arctic Hysteria: New Art from Finland, curated by P.S.1 Director Alanna Heiss and FRAME curator Marketta Seppälä, is presented in the First Floor Galleries. The following was adapted from the exhibition catalogue.

“Arctic Hysteria” was first used by Finnish novelist Marko Tapio to describe the neurotic, irrational mood of the Finnish people. Since the times that the early explorers visited the native people in the Arctic areas, there are stories of an unexplainable “hysteria” that plagued the native peoples in mid-winter during long weeks of darkness. In Tapio’s opinion, the Finnish people should be understood in the light of the Arctic hysteria from which they suffer. However that may be, the mystical and outlandish visions of the Finnish artists presented in Arctic Hysteria: New Art from Finland are deeply rooted in our shared—and so often hysterical—collective consciousness. To deal with issues such as gender, collectivity, nature, and anxiety towards the future, the artists in the exhibition adopt working methods that resemble healing trance states, and in doing so call for a general recuperation and recovery.

Although Finland was the first European country to offer the democratic right to vote to women, the change in women’s status in no way came about as something self-evident—it required several decades of struggle. Through her large-scale drawings, Stiina Saaristo continues this discussion: by appropriating sexist representations, she employs the male face and body to question the way genders are positioned in relation to one another. Salla Tykkä’s works arouse strong and unsettling emotional states encountered from a woman’s perspective which serve as a visual metaphor for the one-sided dynamics of gender and power. In her film Lasso (2000), a young woman looks through a window into a house where a young man is performing with a lasso, but it is ambiguous whether she is frozen due to the beauty and perfection of his movements, or because she is excluded from male capacity and superiority.

In contrast to these gender issues of exclusivity, several artists concern their work with the notion of a collective—perhaps the harsh natural conditions of Finland explain, to some degree, the traditions of teamwork and collective responsibility. Mika Ronkainen’s documentary The Screaming Men (2003) shows a men’s choir that performs by shouting. In the film, Petri Sirviö, the conductor, explains why shouting is such a valid form of communication, and underlines one of the social messages of the choir: “They use their private voices in a collective way.”

The Complaints Choirs project was started by Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, and brings together old and young people, strangers to each other, to voice their specific and personal displeasures and complaints in a common act that always results in something very positive, forcing the participants of the choirs and their audiences to break into smiles and laughter. Jari Silomäki’s ongoing project My Weather Diary (2001-) combines the general with the particularities of each context he chooses to photograph. Through hand-written commentary coupled with photographs of locations from Grajevo in the Balkans, to Bamako in Africa, he distills his personal worries and dreams into complex issues of global concern. Similarly, Reijo Kela’s tragicomic video diary depicts the artist himself for a year, traversing the screen through different locations every day.

The relationship between nature and humanity also emerges as a connecting thread throughout Arctic Hysteria. It does not come about as a projection of a mysterious “Finnishness”, but as a simple point of departure: human culture participates in the cycles of nature. In both of Pekka Jylhä’s works, Trembling and Honouring (2005) and I Would Like to Understand (2000-2001), a white hare ponders the existential mystery of life. Anni Rapinoja speaks for the diversity and fragility of nature by making visible the essence of the natural materials she uses in her installations. The artist becomes an assistant to the processes of nature, so that the basic elements— air, sun, wind and water—have their say.    

In his music and films, Sami Sänpäkkilä attempts to avoid dealing with time in a linear fashion, but instead tries to connect it with nature: “We employ memory in an attempt to rationalize the meaning of life or the search for it. Most people look for such answers but simultaneously drift away from nature and the natural.” Tea Mäkipää’s World of Plenty (2005), a wishful image of an ideal beautiful landscape in which creatures of nature co-exist in peaceful harmony, is so thoroughly naïve that it becomes absurd and thus questions the role of human beings in the real world. Next to this landscape, a series of chairs by Hanna-Kaisa Hirvaskoski, Mikko Nissilä, and Elina Nissinen invite the viewers to sink into their maternal space while engaging in this questioning. Ilkka Halso’s photographic statements force us to appreciate just how real and personal our connection to the environment is, and also raise the question: Shall we allow nature, or what will be left of it, to become merely another well-preserved showcase?

In Arctic Hysteria, the utopian optimism of technological progress in the 1960s and 70s is confronted with an anxiety about the environment and the future. Matti Suuronen’s 1968 Futuro House serves as a screening room for films that depart from the space-age utopian atmosphere that the architectural space itself conjures up. Mika Taanila’s Future Is Not What It Used To Be (2002) entwines the past with the present, in an examination of the disconnect between his characters’ utopian visions of the future and actual scientific achievements, by presenting the fragmented logic of Erkki Kurenniemi, the nuclear scientist and artist. In the works by Pink Twins, a nostalgia for earlier pioneering innovations is still present, and technology, sound, dance, and movement, as well as communal sensitivity are major means in their artistic toolbox. Combined with elements of live-performance, the installation acts as psychedelic abstraction and a new and irrationally comforting state of being.

Markus Copper’s installation, Kursk (2004), is a reference to the fatal accident of the Russian nuclear submarine in 2000. Figures tied with iron chains are trapped by a cataclysmic machine from which there is hardly any hope to surface. Veli Granö’s video works introduce eccentric persons who, in their search for happiness, are obsessed with outer space or the paranormal, and long for a utopian desire to be “elsewhere.” In Strange Message From Another Star (1999), Paavo Rahikainen, a 72-year-old space shuttle engineer, faces reality with a wish: “If I only could find another planet in space where humans could live in peace, I’d go there.”

In the light of Arctic Hysteria: New Art from Finland, how “Finnish” can contemporary Finnish art be in the post-national world which—due to the ever intensifying spread of communications technology—is simultaneously shrinking and expanding. It may be hard to examine to which extent specific cultural traditions contribute to contemporary art today. Regardless, the works by the artists of this exhibition always grow from specific local circumstances but manage to address universal themes that are common to us all. In today’s world, the local can have multiple global significances.