PROJECT "SOMETHING STRANGE"

Exhibition Dates 6th February – 21st March 2004

Curators note: As a word, a place, a time, Tornio, The Aine Art Museum and Kemi Tornio Polytechnic have become for us an association, a manifestation of something special. During the months leading up to the opening of Something Strange we began our work tentatively knowing not where our search would begin, nor where it might end. And now, the artworks take their places for a while in the gallery, while the artists stand back and let the art do the work. And yet, it is important to remember that the artists are not the only architects of this exhibition for there are also the writers, whose essays have inspired, informed and intrigued us and the exhibition team at the museum and staff at the Polytechnic, who have sustained us both from distance and at close proximity.

Curated by Pam Skelton and Sarah Cole

Introduction: Katriina Pietilä-Junturaarticle in Acrobat Reader format

Essay: Joanne Morra. article in Acrobat Reader format

Timo Valjakka: The hound with three tails

1. A lot of Danes moved to Greenland in the 1950s. They brought with them objects that the original inhabitants of that northerly island, the Inuit, did not recognise. Even though the Inuit language and system of concepts were highly developed and precisely fashioned to correspond to their needs – for example, the Inuit language has some 50 words to describe various aspects of snow – they had no word for the objects brought by the Danes. And since there were no words, there were no concepts or comprehension.

The presence of the Danes on Greenland looked like becoming permanent. So, in 1976, the Inuit decided to appoint a special committee to think up a word that could be used to describe the objects they brought with them, and bring them into the sphere of language and of comprehension. The word that the committee settled on following its deliberations was Nerissuaq. The word means ‘art’, but a literal translation would be ‘something strange’. Before 1976, the Inuit language had no word for ‘art’.

2. In his Virmaliste väraval (At the Gate of Northern Lights, 1974), Lennart Meri, the Estonian scientist and writer, and later also President of Estonia, tells how a few brave, inquisitive souls from North Africa and the Middle East went on expeditions to the Arctic regions already very early on, around the time of the last dynasties in Egypt. When they returned from their long journeys, they had with them detailed notes of what they had seen and experienced. One observation that surprised them was that the Northern wildernesses were inhabited.

In his book Meri has assembled excerpts from writings that tell of life in Ultima Thule, the edge of the world, outside the then civilised world. He picks out colourful details, such as a description of the large dogs that walk on two legs and punt themselves across white sand with the aid of long poles, and small boats attached to their feet. An explorer who had apparently watched Arctic hunters from a distance, or who had interpreted stories he had heard, clearly had no concept of snow, skis or wolf pelts.

3. When talk turns to Finland, and especially to the most northerly part of the country, you almost always come up against the same stereotypes: Finland is remote and it is cold and dark there. The sun lights up the white snow for possibly only a few months a year. The inhabitants of this sparsely populated land are by nature melancholic and taciturn, except perhaps when they are drunk.

Are these worn-out clichés recapitulated because very little is actually known about Finland? Or because the limited existing information is second-hand and has been distorted as it was passed along the chain of hearsay? Or are they also repeated because Finns themselves have a habit of propping up the vague and even negative conceptions that foreigners have of their country? Many countries that are remote, from a continental European perspective, for instance, Egypt and Greenland, are still much better known. Or at least conceptions of them tend more in the right direction.

With regard to what Finns themselves say, the Italian anthropology Nuccio Mazzullo has suggested that this could be a defence strategy adopted by a people that has experienced recurrent wars and conquests. Visitors are fed nonsense because Finns unconsciously hope they will stay away, in their own countries.

4. Thirteen British artists are currently setting up a joint exhibition in Tornio, in the city art museum in this town on the edge of Lapland, northern Finland. Most of the artists have never been to Tornio or even to Finland. Their knowledge and conception of the location of the forthcoming exhibition and of the cultural framework surrounding it are entirely based on information acquired indirectly, on what they have read about and heard from others.

A fundamental aspect of the image of contemporary art is the artist who is constantly travelling from one place to another. Instead of sending works made in the studio to an exhibition, the artist travels to be on the spot and to assemble works intended for that specific exhibition space and that situation in situ, frequently out of materials gathered from that place. The world’s museums are this nomadic figure’s studios.

Even though realising the work for a specific situation and display context offers plentiful possibilities, the notion of some form of deeper communication with the local public can easily remains half-realised. Artists who go from one exhibition to another, carry their art as though in a rucksack, and ultimately act on their own terms. What happens when the artist’s aspirations meet the local viewer’s interpretations? Is there time and space for communication, or is the outcome ‘something strange’?

The artists in this exhibition have adopted another approach. As their starting point they have focused their works on the hazily bounded space that lies between Tornio reality and their own knowledge and conceptions of it. One of the themes of their exhibition could specifically be this: at the same time as their works measure and define the space between reality and ‘reality’, they set bounds to it and change it into an open, creative field of action, in which the communication between the artist and the public proceeds naturally, on the terms of both parties. The title of the exhibition, Something Strange, can thus be seen as ironic, too.

5. This is not the first time that artworks have been permitted to rely on second-hand information. One early example may well come from Albrecht Dürer. In 1515, he engraved a picture of a rhinoceros that the King of Portugal had given to the Pope. The ship that was carrying this rare beast sank on its way to Rome, and Dürer made his drawing from a verbal description. The drawing, which is very accurate considering the circumstances, serves wonderfully as an emblem for this exhibition.
The simultaneous presence of two very similar realities can perhaps be compared to the perception-rattling experience produced when a four-colour print goes wrong or a photograph of an object is later projected onto itself. If one angle lines up straight, then in another the colours or outlines go their own way. The mind nevertheless tries to combine the differences and similarities in the pictures into a coherent whole. This is directly comparable to the processes with which we visualise various realities and form conceptions of them. But how are we to bring the world under control? Do we reinforce old clichés or do we try to dismantle them?

6. In the 1920s, a reporter from The Guardian set down his thoughts on the first showings of colour films in London’s kinemas. He missed the dreamlike quietness of silent films and was highly unconvinced of the advantages of the new technology. He first of all feared that the sounds and now also the colours would leave no room for the viewer’s own imagination: the colours make a picture not only real, but also tasteless, and take away the viewer’s own scope for interpretation, the space between the author and the viewer. Individual seeing becomes passive looking.

The early colour films were, nevertheless, plagued by a peculiar technical disadvantage, one that is hard to imagine today. The colours in the early films were made up of overlapping layers of film, which did not always line up. In his article the journalist recalls – with evident delight – how a hound that appeared in one film had three tails, one white, one red and one green.