Helsinki Biennale
12.06.2021
The first Biennale was opened in Helsinki on June 12, in the unique surroundings of Vallisaari Island. The Helsinki Biennial takes place on Vallisaari Island in the midst of a unique natural environment, rich with culture and history. The international art event has been produced in close cooperation with cultural history professionals and nature experts. You can spot artworks on Vallisaari along a marked trail both outdoors and inside historical buildings, gunpowder cellars, and empty residential buildings. The Helsinki Biennale presents 41 international artists and art groups from Finland and around the world, including two famous Polish contemporary art artists: Paweł Althamer and Alicja Kwade.
What matters most in Paweł Althamer’s collaborative works is not what the end result looks like, but the process itself and playing together. His work for Helsinki Biennial was produced in collaboration with Suomenlinna Open Prison.
The community approach is a resource of Paweł Althamer's artistic practice. The artist, trained in sculpture, engages his family members, neighbors and people he meets on the street to create art. This collaboration produces sculptures – which the artist calls totems – that are the traces of the process that has taken place. His practice also involves moving in the public space and bringing the ways of making art to where people are. For example, during his solo exhibition at HAM in 2019, Althamer expanded its exhibition to include art workshops at the local school of Jakomäki, a suburb of Helsinki.
In his participatory projects, Althamer does not notice social differences, on the contrary, entering isolated social groups creates a certain artistic rehabilitation.
Paweł Althamer's work at the Helsinki Biennale was created in cooperation with Suomenlinna Prison and his artist friends Leszek Molski and Jacek Taszakovski. The entire movie was shot in Finland, with Althamer playing the role of one of the seven prisoners who break out of prison. After crossing the sea and the varied landscapes, the refugees finally find their way back to nature and to themselves.
The work consists of two parts. The first is a VR film that allows the viewer to join fugitives in their escape and observe their relationship with the surrounding reality and technology. The second part is a documentary about the making of a VR movie. In this document, prisoners talk about their lives, hopes and freedom. The two movie realities and storytelling methods function as an exercise in empathy.
Alicja Kwade's sculptures provoke us to question our perception and understanding of the surrounding reality.
Alicja Kwade's works contemplate our relationship with nature, our place in the universe and the constant transformation of our world, also as broader philosophical questions.
The beautiful round boulders lying on the rocks of the island of Vallisaari resemble the spherical planets of the solar system. Alicja Kwade's composition "Pars pro Toto" is part of an edition of the project, one of the versions of which appeared at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Natural stones come from different continents of our Earth and also symbolize them. Typical of Kwade's work, this work plays with scale and meaning, inviting us to contextualize our existence and problems in relation to the enormous scale of the universe.
Two stones are located on both sides of the steel plate with double-sided reflecting surfaces. One stone is a real rock; the other is her metallic mirror image in Alice Kwade's Big Be-Hide. The artist chose a partially submerged boulder at the southern end of the inland isthmus between Vallisaari and Kuninkaansaari. The location - on the strip of land separating the bay from the open sea - similarly reflects the theme of "different versus identical".
After the Helsinki Biennale, Alicja Kwade's works will be placed in permanent exhibition as a work of public art in Helsinki's Kalasatama district.
The Helsinki Biennale are opened till September 26, 2021 https://helsinkibiennaali.fi/en/for-visitors/
