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29/9/2011

Animate

Pori Art Museum, Pori

Animate is an exhibition series produced in cooperation with the Pori Art Musem and the Turku Art Museum. It presents Finnish and International contemporary animations. The series examine the role of animation both as part of Finnish and international art, and as an independent art form.

30.09.-30.10.2011
Pori Art Museum, MEDIApoint

Timo Vaittinen: Aeon

“Sitting at home on the couch in the dark, I noticed a small triangular hole near the floor. I had been sitting on the same couch for a week, yet I had not noticed the hole. It was odd, because I thought I had examined every inch of the room carefully with my eyes, thinking about the vanity of existence. The hole seemed to be growing, with a dim, flickering bluish light emanating from it. For a moment it looked as if a family of moles living in the hole were watching some reality show on a 42-inch plasma screen in the safety of their nest. The hole kept growing, and the light shining from it already lit up a small area of the laminate flooring in my small flat. I fought against the pull of the hole, but little by little it kept displacing more and more of the complex ideas concerning the meaning of life I had come up during the week. The growth was exponential, and I realised that the hole would expand to such dimensions that it was useless to struggle against it. I gave up, and looked straight into the light and beyond...”
Timo Vaittinen

Aeon by Timo Vaittinen is an exhibition consisting of independent works: an installation, sculptural elements and stop-motion animation videos. Stop-motion is a slow and time-consuming technique, but Vaittinen sees it as a meditative practice akin to the making of a Tibetan sand mandala. Creating a work picture by picture is like a spiritual exercise, like repeating a mantra. Timo Vaittinen uses no script when he makes his animations; the piece unfolds itself in the process, revealing its meaning in the course of its creation. One of the stop-motion videos is entitled Central Park. Vaittinen took shots of the park at night, animating the one element necessary to create a photograph: light. External circumstances, nature and chance, all have contributed to the work. Every frame in the animation is a record of a unique moment and a reminder of the transience of all things. The result is a combination of documentary and escapist filmmaking, revealing mysterious things, which take place in the park after dark.

The visual language of Aeon is reduced to reflect the underlying abstract forms. The abstractions are not devoid of meaning, however. The work contains visual references to minimalism, occultism and to the iconographies of alternative religions and indigenous peoples’ imagery. A pizza box meets Donald Judd, nearby woods are lit by strange lights, and behind a triangle the spirit of a future aeon finds its manifestation in a rainbow of print inks. The works offer a glimpse into an artistic idiom which breathes beyond concepts, a visual eternity seen through the subjective interpretation of Timo Vaittinen.

The original meaning of the Latin word aeon refers to lifetime, period of existence, but also to eternity. In the occult tradition, aeon refers to the promise of a shorter, new and magical age, in Christianity it stands for eternity, life after death. In the title of the exhibition, it also denotes a vanishing picture of the times, Timo Vaittinen’s personal interpretation of this day and age. But it also alludes to the eternity and permanence, which is embodied in the abstract idiom of the works.
Timo Vaittinen’s installation will serve as the venue for the remainder of the Animate exhibition series.

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01.-27.11.2011
Turku Anikists: Tommi Juutilainen, Niina Suominen and Taru Anttila (Varpumaa)
Animation Crank Handle: Jan Andersson, Maria Björklund, Ami Lindholm and Mark Ståhle

01.11.- 30.11.2011
European contemporary animations: /barbaragurrieri/group, Nathalie Djurberg, Elise Florenty, goldiechiari, Deborah Ligorio, Eva Marisaldi, Ciprian Muresan, Diego Perrone, Francesco Simeti. Curator Anna Daneri and Stefano Coletto (IT)

An image is drained of its force by the way it is used... A more reflective engagement with content would require a certain intensity of awareness –just what is weakened by expectations brought to images disseminated by the media. The leaching out of content is what contributes most of the deadening of feeling. (Susan Sontag)

According to the latest book by Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, there is a constitutional impossibility on the part of the viewer to become aware of a specific reality, unless he or she is actively involved in it. However, in the case of images, there remains the sense of “standing back and thinking, ... Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time". In a completely different context from the one analyzed by Sontag, we might say that a certain distance produced by images, in our case animated images, could in fact enhance awareness.

Animated Worlds. European contemporary animations presents works by nine artists from France, Italy, Roumania and Sweden. They all engage with a complex of issues linked to our present moment from a perspective which can be envisaged as ‘European’. Drawn from images taken from reality or documentaries (Florenty, goldiechiari, Ligorio), from direct experience (/barbaragurreri/group, Marisaldi, Muresan), from imagination (Djurberg, goldiechiari) or from art history (Simeti, Perrone), the exhibited works build articulated worlds which arise from a deep proximity within the artists’ experience and result in reflections on migration, geopolitical transformation, social relations, marginalization, cultural inheritance and physical or imaginary landscapes.

The common thread in the exhibition is the low-tech attitude pursued by the artists which makes their works probably less experimental in terms of the opportunities given by new technologies for contemporary animation, but highly consistent in terms of poetic resonances. Traditional animation techniques such as stop-motion, cut-ups, digital drawing, and claymation, are used to produce a certain distance from the subject matter, allowing viewers to build their own interpretative tools.

The majority of the works are screened or projected individually, creating a polyphony of images with a syntonic rhythm that stands out in the condensation of meaning and the simplification of means, resorting to traditional artistic languages such as drawing, sculpture, collage, readymade, and of course, video. A compilation of the early Super-8 clay animations by Nathalie Djurberg, recently remastered with the music by Hans Berg and giving shape to metaphors of everyday violence, is presented facing the pathological world-relation represented in Elise Florenty’s work, the suspended destiny of migrants by /barbaragurrieri/group, the plastic dynamism of the sculptures in motion by Diego Perrone, the satellite vision of the Earth by Deborah Ligorio, and the constallation of sex toys by goldiechiari. Two portraits are looped into a single projection, depicting the two ages of man: the bending beggar crossing the street in Eva Marisaldi’s work, and Ciprian Muresan’s street child sniffing glue as a product of the post-Communist era. The wild landscape taken from art history by Francesco Simeti is an ideal closing work for the exhibition, a back-to- the-future disposition towards reality.
Anna Daneri

PORI SCREENINGS: Turku Anikists and Animation Crank Handle
02.11.2011 at 6.30 pm Turku Anikists artist talks and screening
06.11.2011 at 2 pm Turku Anikists screening
09.11.2011 at 6.30 pm Animation Crank Handle artist talks and screening
20.11.2011 at 2 pm Animation Crank Handle screening

In co-operation with: Turku Art Museum, the Animation Degree Programme at the Arts Academy at Turku University of Applied Sciences, Turku Capital of Culture 2011 programme.

More information:
Pia Hovi-Assad, Exhibition Curator, tel. +358 (0)44 701 1089 pia.hovi-assad@pori.fi

Opening 30 September 2011 at 18.00

Pori Art Museum
Eteläranta, 28100 Pori
Hours:
Tuesday to Sunday 11am to 6pm
Wednesdays 11am to 8pm
Free general tours of the exhibitions on Wednesdays at 6pm.
Closed on Mondays
Entrance fees:
3,5 / 1,5 / 1 Eur Family ticket 7 Eur

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