null Interviewing Jan Kaila and Henk Slager



This spring, for the second time, Uniarts Helsinki will host a Research Pavilion in Venice during the 57th Venice Biennale. The Pavilion’s programme will include three contemporary art exhibitions and over 40 cross-disciplinary events, all of which explore the theme Utopia of Access. Uniarts Helsinki interviewed the two curators of the upcoming Pavilion, Jan Kaila and Henk Slager, about its origins, theme, and expansive programme. Both feel that the Nordics have the potential to be the forerunners in the field of artistic research.
 

Could you tell a bit more about the inception of the first Research Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015?

Kaila: Before the first Research Pavilion, the two of us were among the four or five people who founded EARN, the European Artistic Research Network, which is still functioning. One part of EARN’s activities was taking doctoral students to biennales, triennales and so forth. At that time we had been in Venice many times.

Slager: We did a project in 2009 called Becoming Bologna which was a kind of think tank meeting that involved many EARN participants. It included a keynote by Daniel Birnbaum and two days of discussion about the Bologna Process and the notion of research. Two years later the International University of the Arts Venice (IUAV) organized a huge conference called Art as a Thinking Process, a follow-up project where a lot of people from the EARN network were invited. The next step was taken in 2013, when Kuva [Kuvataideakatemia / Academy of Fine Arts] in collaboration with EARN and the Finnish Pavilion organized a two-day research seminar along with a project by Terike Haapoja. So there was already a continuous story of an interaction with EARN on the one hand, and the Venice Biennale on the other.

Kaila: The logical step was not to repeat the same, always 2-3 day project, but to do something more extensive. That is how the idea of a research pavilion came to be.

Slager: There was so much positive energy related to the project. It’s really great that, because Jan and I are working on this again, we now have the knowledge of the first experiment and we have been able to develop it in a more profound way. It’s a happy situation.
 

The opening party last time seemed to be a huge success. What were your impressions of the opening and of how the pavilion was received?

Kaila: We did not know what to expect. This was the exciting moment, because nothing like this had ever existed before in Venice. We of course wanted to collaborate with Frame, and they announced at the opening of the Finnish Pavilion during daytime that the evening party would be at our pavilion. Transportation was provided, so there were boats taking people to our opening. We knew something might happen, but when people actually started coming, it was like a flood. I think we had over 1,000 guests.
 

Could you tell some examples of the feedback of the first Research Pavilion which you might take to the next one?

Slager: Putting the discussion of research to such a sophisticated and high-profile environment as the Venice Biennale makes us aware that we take a risk. If you do something there, you’re making a statement. In the first edition [of the pavilion] we went for an experimental approach. With the next Research Pavilion we are making the statement: this is the current state of the discussion [on artistic research]. Now that we’ve had more time, we have been more mindful in selecting the artists and developing the theme.
 

Can you tell about this year’s theme of the Pavilion, the Utopia of Access?

Kaila: The origin of the theme is in the EU-based decision that all publicly-funded research should be openly accessible by 2025. This has created, for those who work in the field, a lot to think about. It’s a big commercial thing and it involves politics, academic politics. Take the arts, for instance: you have to find out how you’ll make things accessible through the internet. How do you do that in music or performing arts? Because you can’t put a play physically online, you have to put the documentations of it, which results in metadata. This creates a lot of thinking around what metadata is in relation to arts and culture. Working at the Swedish Research Council, I’ve been dealing with some of these problems firsthand.

Slager: At the same time, we are also dealing with the relatively young field of artistic research. We are asking two things: firstly, what does this whole discussion mean for artistic research, and also, can artistic research give some kind of critical feedback on the whole notion of open access.

Kaila: That is the academic, more theoretical part of it. Besides that, there is the metaphorical side, if you will, of open access. For example, politically speaking: how open is Europe? Or how open is art? And so on.

Slager: This was something that came out of European politics but can also address the whole situation in Europe. When we started to think about this theme half a year or so ago, we couldn’t have known how topical it would become in the current public discourse. The state of Europe is something that is on people’s minds, especially in relation to the US and other countries, as well.
 

What are your impressions of the proposals for the exhibitions and the events?

Kaila: The big difference to the first exhibition is that this time, in addition to fine arts, we also included music and the performing arts, and, potentially, all kinds of art. We sought collaboration with not only visual art programmes in Sweden and Norway but programmes that have a similar structure as the University of the Arts Helsinki [Uniarts Helsinki]. As such, there are people from various disciplines represented.

Slager: We received very good proposals. I think a lot of people had the creative and intellectual energy to come up with profound proposals and the high quality has been more than a happy surprise. It was very exciting to see that different disciplines were able to make really interesting connections between fields.

Kaila: It’s also a laboratory of collaboration between people who traditionally might not work together. That’s what Uniarts Helsinki is about.

Slager: It’s actually – already – the ontology of the project. When we started this thing [The first Research Pavilion] two years ago we called it experimentality and we were thinking about the lab as a kind of metaphor for our location [Sala Del Camino]. Having a bit of a critical distance to the whole spectacle machine of the biennale and having a kind of laboratory for thinking and discussing topics. The laboratory element is still in the very heart of the Research Pavilion.

Kaila: And then of course we have other collaborators. It’s much more layered and international than last time.
 

How will the 2017 pavilion be different from 2015?

Slager: The most important differences are that this year it will be more collaborative and it will feature three exhibitions instead of one. Also, the programme will be much broader, as we’ll have different artistic disciplines connecting in a very inspired way. We’ll be focusing not only in the fine arts, but also in performative studies and music.

We’ll have people from all around the world, who, because of the high quality and the state of research in the Nordic countries, are actually coming here to the Nordics to develop their research skills. That is something I think that Nordic countries can be proud of; that they present themselves to the world as a huge community of the artistic research field.

 

Read more about the Research Pavilion’s exhibitions
Read more about the Pavilion’s Camino Events