You Gotta Say Yes to Another Access

May 11th – July 2nd
Curated by Jan Kaila and Henk Slager

The first exhibition in the Research Pavilion,You gotta say yes to another access, presents a multiplicity of interpretations and approaches from artists doing research in Northern Europe. It offers a strong statement about the accessibility of various aesthetics and political approaches within the doctoral studies and artistic educational sphere as a whole in Finland, Norway and Sweden. The exhibition demonstrates that universities and academies function as genuine laboratories within contemporary art.

At the entrance of the pavilion the karaoke setting (CC-Bye Bye Baby) by Andrea Coyotzi Borja & Sinem Kayacan makes a statement about the directive character of the participation rhetorics that form the basis of the Berlin Declaration of Open Access.

Andre Alves video-installation A shadow in plain-sight links Dan Graham’s sculptural glass environments to Nietzsche’s dialogue between The Wanderer and his Shadow. This interaction invites further thought on the nature of openness in art.

Starting from a series of conversations with post-migrant youths in Sweden about geopolitical problems such as integration, imagination and utopia, Behzad Khosravi-Noori & Rene Leon-Rosales, present the multi-channel video-installation Accessing Utopia.

Taking Jacopo de' Barbari’s View of Venice as a starting point, Bull.Miletic revisit established hierarchies of space and power embedded in the document’s cartographic principles of composite imaging and spatial control, while shedding light on its new life as digitally encoded micro-temporal events distributed across networks into new topological configurations.

Eva Weinmayr’s multi-part installation "Library Underground – a reading list for a coming community" presents a workspace to explore strategies of radical librarianship and models of dissemination, which propose alternatives to the streamlining of knowledge through institutional policies.

Mireia c. Saladrigues takes visitors on a Virtual Tour of the Research Pavilion. It questions what the presence of the Google Street View Camera in the exhibition space reveals about the physicality and relevance of online systems. What is the (limited) metaphorical space of the screen in giving access to an immersive worldwide exploration of the exhibition?

With her installative photo work Access to Landscape Niran Baibulat draws attention to the writerly body: a body that does not primarily focus on simply communicating an accessible message, but focuses especially on negotiating with situational factors.

By using animation and masquerades Stacey Sacks video-installation The Walls Have Tongues (or peace the old-fashioned way) looks for architectures of privilege. From a postcolonial body she considers the tropes of sovereignty and entitlement, which are intrinsically connected to notions of access and identity.

Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec's installation Reading Stanley Brouwn showcases a physical form of archiving. Sambolec purposefully questions the understanding of the written-documentation archive – so crucial to current access thinking - as something tied exclusively to the past.

Vincent Roumagnacs intervention, Backdrop, is made up from a large semi-transparent greenhouse film that is secured to a backstage arch at the far end of the exhibition space in such a way that it disrupts the apparent, linear understanding of the stage.  

Artists

Andrè Alves

André Alves (1981, Portugal) is a visual artist and doctoral researcher at Valand Academy. In his practice he combines a reinterpretation of aesthetics of sadness, madness and idleness, as possibilities to investigate different languages and understandings regarding emotional ecologies and vulnerabilities of human sensitivity.

www.theandrealves.com
 

Niran Baibulat 

Niran Baibulat (b. 1960, Tampere) is a visual artist, based in Helsinki, working in installations and environmental works. In her works she applies common everyday skills employing a site-specific installation to construct a space. She investigates an embodiment approach to a place. In her recent works walking has been a constructive method to investigate.

Baibulat is pursuing her postgraduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki, Finland.

niranbaibulat.com.

Photo: Marja Söderlund
 

Andrea Coyotzi Borja & Sinem Kayacan


Andrea Coyotzi Borja

Andrea Coyotzi Borja (b. 1984, Puebla) is an artist based in Helsinki.
Her artistic practice focuses on the subject of the quotidian and its
relationship to the artistic event. This developed to her current
research on ‘The Infra-ordinary as an art practice’ in her Doctoral
studies at Aalto University. Her artwork has been exhibited in
different countries such as Mexico, United States, Italy, Hungary,
Poland, Spain, Bulgaria, and Finland.

http://www.andreacoyotziborja.com/

 

Sinem Kayacan

Sinem Kayacan (b.1985, Istanbul) is an artist based in Helsinki. She
works with moving and still images, words, sounds and their fusion.
Her interests are embodied and hybrid forms of scholarship as well as
the notions of ambiguity and uncertainty in the context of research
and artistic practice. Currently, she is doing her doctoral research
titled 'Performing my body: Rehearsals' in Aalto University, Finland.

http://shemovesshe.com/

Photo: Sinem Kayacan & Andrea Coyotzi Borja

 

Bull.Miletic

Bull.Miletic are visual artists Synne T. Bull (b. 1973, Norway) and Dragan Miletic (b. 1970, Yugoslavia) who have been working together since 2000. Their work brings into question the entangled histories of the moving image and spatial perception, while addressing the imaginative and emotional capacities increasingly colonized by remote sensing aerial imaging technologies.

http://bull.miletic.info

Photo: Frode Olsen
 

Behzad Khosravi-Noori & René León-Rosales

Behzad Khosravi-Noori (b. 1976, Tehran) is an artist and writer based in Stockholm and Tehran. By using micro history as a method of exploration, his research based work investigates cultural phenomena and political representation within hyper-politicised time, place, and body within the realm contemporary art.  Khosravi-Noori graduated from the Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran, with a Master in Motion Picture and a Master in Art in Public Realm at Konstfack University College of Art and Design, Stockholm. Currently he is a PhD Candidate at Konstfack within the department of fine art.

Photo: Staffan Löwstedt
 

René León-Rosales (b. 1971, Santiago) works as a researcher at the Multicultural centre (www.mkcentrum.se), Stockholm.  His doctoral dissertation was an ethnographical study of the impact of economic and ethnic segregation, policies and masculine ideals on boy’s identity formations in a multiethnic school in northern Botkyrka in Stockholm. Current research project deals with the emergence and politicization of youth movements from disadvantaged multiethnic neighborhoods in Sweden’s urban areas.

Photo: Paulina López
 

Vincent Roumagnac

Vincent Roumagnac (b. 1973, Basque Country, France) is a theatre artist and researcher based in Helsinki and Lyon. His practice is based on time-specific explorations of the redistribution of scenic agencies and temporalities beyond human scale and towards an ecologically-minded stage. He is conducting a doctorate at the Performing Arts Research Centre of the Uniarts Helsinki on Anthroposcenic Chronotopias; Multitemporality, Hetrochrony, Idiorythmie at Play.

www.vincentroumagnac.com

Photo: Aurélie Pétrel
 

Stacey Sacks

Stacey Sacks (b. 1974, Zimbabwe) grew up in Harare, Zimbabwe with wild summer thunderstorms, flies that lay eggs in human bodies, frizzy hair and toilet paper shortages. In theatre, film and stop-motion animation, she is a performer, writer, director and clown currently playing a PhD in Performing Arts at Stockholm’s University of the Arts. Entitled improvising Trickster, it is a hyper-disciplinary excavation of whiteness and privilege.

Link for more information.

In photo: Stacey Sacks as character BLANK. Photo credit - Jonas Jörneberg


Mireia c. Saladrigues

Mireia c. Saladrigues (b. 1978, Terrassa) is a researcher at the Doctoral Programme of the University of the Arts Helsinki. Her research Behaving Unconventionally in Gallery Settings documents and fosters human and non-human cases of alteration and strangeness in cultural practices by proposing an artistic and theoretical re-reading of nonconformity.

She has received numerous awards, from which the most recent are Kone Research and Art Production Grant (2016-2019).

Saladrigues is part of àngels barcelona gallery.

Photo: Tomi Glad
 

Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec

Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec (b.1972, Ljubljana – Slovenia) is an artist and musician based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Sambolec is working with invisible ephemeral phenomena and the notion of space. His artistic practice is a poetic exploration of relationships between transitory and temporal flows like sound, weather phenomena and human activities and built environment and social spaces they inhabit. His works encompass interdisciplinary and mixed media installations, sound interventions and electro acoustic music.

www.taogvs.org
www.realitysoundtrack.org

Photo: Tomi Lombar/Delo
 

Eva Weinmayr

Eva Weinmayr (born in Germany) is an artist, writer, editor and member of AND Publishing – a practice, partial philosophy and set of strategies based in London. She lectures widely and works with academic institutions as well as art and activist spaces, including SALT Istanbul, MayDay Rooms London, Kunstverein Munich, Showroom London. She currently conducts a PhD in artistic research Why Publish? at Valand Academy Gothenburg.

www.evaweinmayr.com
www.andpublishing.org 

Photo: Stefan Jensen, 2016

Curators

 

Jan Kaila earned his Doctorate in Fine Arts from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2002. Between 2004 and 2014 he served as Professor of Artistic Research at the Academy. Kaila has worked as a lecturer, curator and evaluator of fine art and fine art education in several European countries. He has exhibited widely in Europe, the United States, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Kaila was one of the founding members of the European Artistic Research Network in 2004. Since 2014, Kaila has been the Advisor of Artistic Research at the Swedish Research Council and a visiting researcher at Uniarts Helsinki in charge of the research project Poetic Archeology.

 

As Professor of Artistic Research (Finnish Academy of Fine Art 2010-2015) and as Dean of MaHKU Utrecht, Henk Slager has made significant contributions to the debate on the role of research in visual art. In 2004, Henk Slager – together with Jan Kaila and Gertrud Sandqvist – initiated the European Artistic Research Network (EARN), a network that investigates the impacts of artistic research on current art education through symposia, expert meetings, and presentations. Departing from a similar focus on artistic research, he has also produced various curatorial projects, the most recent being Offside Effect (1st Tbilisi Triennial, 2012), Aesthetic Jam (Project Taipei Biennial, 2014), and Asia Time (5th Guangzhou Triennial). Slager is currently preparing To Seminar at BAK in Utrecht.

Photo: Petri Summanen/Uniarts Helsinki