The Curators of Summer Exhibition 2024
Jubilee – 25 vuotta Haihattelua! / 25 YEARS OF HAIHATUS! Exhibition: Risto Puurunen & Panu Ollikainen
HAIHATUS25 -Exhibition: Ali Akbar Mehta, Elham Rahmati, Jenna Jauhiainen & Julius Valve
Voimametsä -Exhibition: Kaisa Vigman and workshops Anna Miller
Näkymättömyys / Invisibility -Exhibition (KITA Gallery): Tuomo Vuoteenoma
JUBILEE - 25 vuotta Haihattelua -osuus
Fantasy House, ITE (Outsider) feald and yard
Risto Puurunen
Executive Director of Haihatus Art Center and curator of Jubilee section
Haihatus celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. Merja Metsänen and Raimo Auvinen began their “haihattelu” (daydream/drifting) inspired by backyard art at the old Nokka school in Hartola in 1999. In 2000, they moved with their families to Koiravuori in Joutsa, to the premises of an old hospital, where the art institution’s activities continue to this day.
I myself first ended up at Haihatus in the summer of 2015, when I had the honor of participating in the summer art exhibition as an artist. I spent a couple of weeks on-site building my artwork in the Gallery House. I got to know Merja, Raimo, the curatorial team, and others involved in the operation at the time. The enchantment of Haihatus hit me full force! What an environment! What a vibe! What people!
Since then, I visited Haihatus occasionally as I passed by. The place was delightful, but I felt sorry for Merja and Raimo, endlessly laboring for art. I silently promised myself that I would never end up in such a situation. And here I am – and have been for nearly five years. Haihatus is forging ahead with the support of a strong group of volunteers and art professionals, creating a wide range of cultural experiences in Joutsa. We’ve offered contemporary art, circus, ITE art, kinetic art, concerts, performances, light art, workshops, community art…
Hopefully, this ‘wild horse of the cultural scene’ will never fully grow up! Welcome to celebrate Haihatus’ 25-year journey and enjoy the culture!
HAIHATUS25 section
Gallery House
Ali Akbar Mehta
Curator of HAIHATUS25
How to come together in an unstable state
What are the new ways of seeing and experiencing the world being shaped in our name, or that we are shaping for ourselves and others?
Artistic practice and research today are increasingly enmeshed in systems and ecologies. Collaboration and transdisciplinarity are key themes. What’s more, we now recognise that the major issues the world faces – the issues that matter – are all systems issues. Systems are reshaping the world order, which today is based on disenfranchisement, necropolitical governments prioritising security and ‘management of risk’ over welfare, socio-political-legal architectures of control, technology-driven speed regimes, and borderization as processes of containment and regulation.
One system issue is how these techno-political regimes affect the world around us, and how we experience, understand, and learn from it. A micronarrative within the exhibition, a trajectory formed through works by Joss Allen, Sheung Yiu, Adnan Mirza, Bruno Moreschi and Bernado Fontes, seeks to subvert these effects. Together these four works present systems-critical techno-political narratives that foreground questions of histories, memory, home, reality, commodified value, extractivist capitalism, and ‘strategy of domination’, and seek to expand ways of collaborative and transdisciplinarity knowing.
Lue Mehtan pidempi kuraattorin tervehdys englanniksi tästä linkistä.
Elham Rahmati
Curator of HAIHATUS25
How can artistic practices enact care webs that enable co-constituted, interdependent subjects to repair, rebuild, and cultivate wills for resistance and solidarity amid, and in the aftermath of, experiences of overwhelming negative affect in increasingly hostile environments? For the HAIHATUS25 -exhibition, I collaborated with artists and filmmakers whose work traces identities, personal stories, disciplines and ideas that, through various perceptions, explore this very question. They recognise and challenge emotions that are not supposed to be felt because they may evoke crises, and get in the way of expectations of who we are and what our lives should be. They offer poignant reflections on notions of interpersonal dynamics, romantic love and its many nuances, longing and belonging, generational trauma, feminist sisterhoods and imagining internationalist solidarities.
Bogna, Juliana, Golrokh, Jade, Minjee, Nayab, Paola, Uzair, August, Anna, and Samra are all among the many artists whose presence, works and perspectives in the past years have gradually transformed the Finnish art scene into a more exciting, playful, receptive and subversive space (that is, these days, maybe a little less wary of confrontation). I’d like to believe there is an understanding amongst us all: merely sharing one’s experience doesn’t bring the wall down, but it can certainly help us keep going. In Sara Ahmed’s words, “Once we find each other, so much else becomes possible.”
Jenna Jauhiainen
Curator of HAIHATUS25
This exhibition was curated in the shadow of the genocide in Palestine. Since October, 2023, not a day has passed without bearing witness to the blatant racism of Western nations in both downplaying the situation and enabling Israel in ethnically cleansing Gaza. Thus, it is evermore important to build cultural resilience by including as many perspectives and experiences as possible into art that we choose to exhibit.
The themes that interested me in curating the artists for this show are the varieties of corporeal experience and the radical softness in addressing contemporary societal conditions. Alma Tuuva AKA @pikakahvimemegirl is a revolutionary meme admin challenging the way we think about labor and social justice in Finland. Gabrielė Gervickaitė is a cyborg whose work centers on biopolitics. Gülbeden Kulbay is known for her culinary actions, now catered to us in the kitchen of the gallery house. Minni Välipakka is a media artist breaking new ground in experimenting with sensory experiences and neurodiversity.
All of the artists mentioned above are familiar to me from previous collaborations. Yet, as a firm believer in coincidences, I also curated Piergiorgio Colone whose work I encountered by chance in my second home in Rome, Italy, over the Winter. His interest in stone and light as materials for his art are something we can easily provide here in Finland – the nightless nights of the Summer spent above the oldest bedrock in Europe.
Julius Valve
Curator of HAIHATUS25
HAIHATUS25 -exhibition brings forth a plurality of voices that are usually heard only in the margins of Finnish society. In Finland, just having a foreign sounding name will drastically lower your chances of getting a job in all different industries. Intersectionality, coined by Kimberly Crenshaw and collectively founded by the body of work of black feminists such as the Combahee River Collective, bell hooks and many more, starts from the notion that different social conditions, intersections, that overlap with each other leads cumulatively to more oppressive situations. Whiteness, and white privilege, is something that is not present to those who have it but to those who suffer from it. Predominantly white societies needs to understand that racist rhetorics in parliament politics, toughening immigration policy, Finnish colonialist control of Sámi land rights, Sámi self-defintion and politics, and the unwillingness to condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza are all forms of the same old white supremacy that cloaks itself as so-called “objective opinions”.
In capitalistic and patriarchal societies othering happens also in other intersections: being born to a lower class home will determine your future income, being trans, queer, neurodivergent or a natal woman might hamper one’s access to healthcare, being disabled will stop you from interacting and moving around in a world made for the able-bodied, being a non-human animal will determine your lifespan and rights, etc. We need to create a world that truly recognises the differences in ability and possibilities between people and thrive to create a more equal world for everybody.
Voimametsä / Power Forest Section
Kaisa Vigman
Curator, artistic producer and director of Haihatus’ Voimametsä (Power Forest) community art project
Kaisa Vigman (b. 1966) is a versatile cultural worker from Hartola, whose heart is dedicated to guiding children and youth. Following the motto “Good things and joy must be shared with as many people as possible,” Kaisa, who has a background in education, is a musician, writer, and artisan. She is also enthusiastic about creating and producing videos and audiobooks. Additionally, she is a slightly quirky grandmother of five.
The Voimametsä community art project by Haihatus began as a low-threshold art project for children and youth in 2021. In the first year, it involved a dozen young participants. After the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that loneliness and the risk of social exclusion affected not only children and youth. Thus, participation in the community art project was made available to everyone. Then, the war in Ukraine started.
“Today, Voimametsä is like a big umbrella with a wide range of art activities underneath,” says project coordinator Kaisa Vigman. “This whole thing started with volunteer work—a desire to do something good and provide meaningful activities and the joy of success to as many people as possible. The exhibition being built in the Voimametsä area is an independent part of the Haihatus summer exhibition. In the past four years, nearly a hundred people aged 8-68 have participated in some way, and no one has been turned away. Ella Keihäsniemi has been a co-director from the start.”
“In the first year, we revamped OssiBussi with the young participants, and it turned out great. The design was created by Lempi Peltonen, who was in 6th grade at the time. Now, both Lempi and Ella are new young artists in this summer’s Jubilee exhibition,” Kaisa Vigman rejoices.
Anna Miller
Workshops and Events
When the war in Ukraine began and a refugee reception center was established in Joutsa, Voimametsä’s volunteer activities took a new turn. Anna Miller, an artist and dissident living in Haihatus’s artist residency, began planning and organizing various art workshops suitable for the whole family, aiming to create a sense of belonging and community through art.
“I have always dreamed of a place like Haihatus, where like-minded people help each other and create art together,” says Anna. Under her coordination, Haihatus began organizing communal celebrations from Christmas to the early spring Maslenitsa festival.
Näkymättömyys-osuus
KITA-galleria
Tuomo Vuoteenoma
Artistic Director, KITA
This summer, the House of Kinetic Art is hosting a summer exhibition on the theme Invisibility. The works spread from the attic all the way to the shoreline. The artists of the exhibition are Elisa Hillgen, Mari Hokkanen, Marianne Kurki, Antti Kytömäki, Mimosa Pale, Marloes van Son, Kestutis Svirnelis and Tuomo Vuoteenoma.
But what is invisibility? Good or bad thing? Every person sometimes dreams of invisibility, how to be a fly on the wall when something concealed happens. Something that only the imagination can reach. Invisibility is the missing piece, the fact that something essential is surprisingly missing. Invisibility is not non-existence, there can be smoke without fire.
Artists are often asked to work for free. The plot is to create works of art, which are then compensated by visibility in different exhibitions and happenings. In the this case, the reward remains invisible.
At Kitagallery’s summer exhibition, eight excellent artists offer wonderful works of art to the public. Everything you can’t see, on the other hand, belongs to the theme of the exhibition, Invisibility. Experiencing a work of art often requires deepening, stopping and time, when thoughts and, in the best case, imagination try to fill in possible gaps. At its sweetest, experiencing an art exhibition is exactly this: the artworks affect thoughts and feelings individually, so that every exhibition experience is very intimate and personal.
“Art is a lie that helps us see the truth” – Pablo Picasso
COLLABORATORS
