FNG Research: media art

João Laia, Chief Curator, Finnish National Gallery / Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma

Also published in Leevi Haapala, João Laia, Jari-Pekka Vanhala (eds.), ARS22: Eläviä kohtaamisia – Living Encounters. A Museum of Contemporary Art Publication 173/2022. Helsinki: Finnish National Gallery / Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma & Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2022.

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We live in a time of generalised crisis. Developments in ecology, economics, health, labour, migration, politics, technology, and beyond have triggered an ‘emergency convergence’ through which these fields manifest as part of a cumulative, integrated movement. Yet despite this confluence, translated in the mutual implication and global reach of this manifold crisis, such coalition does not unify the world and its agents under identical conditions. Defined by the feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti as a technologically mediated interlinking with the ‘natural-culture continuum of our terrestrial milieu’, the webbed composition of life on Earth also includes differences regarding human geographical location and/or ‘access to social and legal entitlements, technologies, safety, prosperity, and good health services’. In fact, accrued historically through processes of domination and exclusion, inequality has in recent times expanded around the world, although – and depending on their contextual inscription – each actor perceives the impacts of these intensifying tensions differently. In Braidotti’s words, ‘(t)he sexualised others (non-binary, women, LBGTQ+); the racialised others (non-Europeans, indigenous); and the naturalised others (animals, plants, the Earth)’ have permanently throughout history been closer to any given crisis.^[1]

The urgent features of the current situation have given rise to a generalised sense of anxiety and menace. For Braidotti, ‘(e)xhaustion and fatigue – a recurrent sense of hopelessness and impossibility – have become prominent features of the contemporary psychic landscapes’, functioning as ‘witnesses to the daily and nightly struggles to come to terms with what our world has become and the complexities of our historical context’. The accumulation and overlapping of fatigue, fear, and despair generates feelings of impotence, ‘a social and psychological dimming of a sense of possibility, which triggers a systemic fragmentation and a shattering of our relational capacity’.^[2] Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi also identifies a current inability emotionally and rationally to process current events, whose speed is intensifying, leading to nervous overstimulation. Berardi names this state of things ‘chaos’, articulating it as both ‘the measure of the complexity of the world in relation to the capacities of intellectual reduction’ and ‘the excessive density of the infosphere in relation to the psychosphere’.^[3] Such argument adds the imprint of technology to the context described by Braidotti, underlining how the digitally led exponential increase of information flows has contributed to the exhaustion of the contemporary psychic landscape and an erosion of collective affinities.

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^[1] Rosi Braidotti. ‘“We” Are in This Together, But We Are Not One and the Same’, Bioethical Inquiry 17 (2020), 465–69.

^[2] Braidotti, ‘“We’ Are in This Together…’, 465–69.

^[3] Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility. London and New York: Verso, 2017, 2.

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Featured image: Installation view of Jenna Sutela’s I Magma, 2019, comprising head-shaped lava lamps and mobile app, on display in ‘ARS22 Living Encounters’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki
Finnish National Gallery / Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Pirje Mykkänen

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Read more — Download ‘ARS22 – Living Encounters’, by João Laia, as a PDF

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’ARS22 Living Encounters’, until 16 October 2022, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki

Leevi Haapala, João Laia, Jari-Pekka Vanhala (eds.), ARS22: Eläviä kohtaamisia – Living Encounters. A Museum of Contemporary Art Publication 173/2022. Helsinki: Finnish National Gallery / Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma & Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2022, available from the Finnish National Gallery’s webshop, https://museoshop.fi/en/product/ars22-elavia-kohtaamisia-living-encounters/

Gill Crabbe, FNG Research

When a national collection marks a milestone in its history, it offers a chance to get a glimpse of the changes that have contributed to its evolution. Gill Crabbe asks three curators from the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma / Finnish National Gallery about the process of preparing a new book that opens the doors to the past 30 years of the museum’s acquisitions

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In our digital age when e-books and online webzines are the order of the day, the production of a book is a special project. It is an In Real Life event, a hand-held object that has a physical life and span, something not only to be read, but for the reader or readers perhaps to adorn with personalised marginalia, a concretised narrative that can be physically place-marked with folded page corners, easily navigated (no endless screen scrolling) and delved into anywhere anytime without plugging-in. The book, far from being an anachronism, is in fact gaining in value as the exponential expansion of electronic media progresses. And books, especially when commissioned to commemorate or celebrate, can be a multiple monument, honouring achievements over time. This is the case with a beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated book, The Many Forms of Contemporary Art, which celebrates 30 years of collecting contemporary art. It is the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma’s monument to its own art collection, in book form.

‘ I think a physical book is still important and it’s a topic we discussed a lot ourselves,’ says Kati Kivinen, Chief Curator of Collections at Kiasma, one of three of the museum’s curators who were driving the project. ‘Personally, I prefer to roam through a book when accessing a theme or topic, rather than looking at hundreds of images of artworks online, even more so after two years of watching everything on screen during the pandemic. Also the book is closer to the works themselves, being concrete – a book lying between an image on screen and the actual artworks.’

In addition to its celebratory aspect, the decision to publish the book was also practical – Kiasma has been undergoing renovations since early 2021 and with its exhibition spaces out of action, and many projects off the agenda, the museum’s curators found themselves time-richer, and in Kivinen’s words ‘with an opportunity of a book project on 30 years of collecting. We have never done a comprehensive overview of the collection like this before and since our publications have always been linked to the exhibitions that we present, this offered a rare chance to concentrate on the collection without this kind of agenda.’

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Featured image: Nina Roos, Lost in Yellow, 2000, oil on polycarbonate sheet, metal stand, 90cm x 175cm x 241cm (each sheet), installed in the lobby at Kiasma
Finnish National Gallery / Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Petri Virtanen
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Read more — Download ‘Celebrating Three Decades of Collecting Contemporary Art’, by Gill Crabbe, as a PDF

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