Synthesis
— The Before, the Now and the Potential Future
presentation

online / May 13, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM

Work-in-progress presentation with artists:
Paweł Janicki (PL), Kaisu Koivisto (FI), Anna Nykyri (FI), Marko Tandefelt (FI)
and organizers: Agnieszka Kubicka-Dzieduszycka (PL), Anna Puhakka (FI)
in English

From March 2020, together with the Helsinki Artists Association (HAA), we are testing the possibilities of remote artistic collaboration in the field of media art, accepting impossibilities and shortcomings, experimenting and drawing conclusions in the perspective of necessary change heralded by the pandemic turmoil. What we had planned as a simple collaboration turned out an exploration of the current challenges, and opportunities. We wonder if and how art can respond to the postulate of sustainable, environmentally conscious life? What effects can the post-pandemic regime of limitation and lack have on the idea of co-creation and co-authorship? Can a model based on temporary alliances between artists and art institutions, on their interaction mediated by video chat applications, bring new patterns to creating and experiencing art?

Koivisto and Nykyri, Finnish artists chosen by the HAA in an open call for ideas, were deeply inspired by the WRO 2021 theme REVERSO, and creative opportunities encrypted in an algorithmic application Synthesis, that gave the title to the entire project, and was created as its starting point by the Polish artist Paweł Janicki. At the core of the collaboration between Nykyri and Koivisto has been their experimentation with video, sound, movement, interaction, and the new practical programming skills that the artists are acquiring during the course of the project.

The outcome of Synthesis is going to be the new interactive video installation by Nykyri and Koivisto called Sula (English: Defrost), created in consultation with Finnish concept designer and creative technologist Marko Tandefelt, that is going to be presented in November at the WRO Media Art Biennale in Wrocław as well as at the Oodi Central Library in Helsinki. The artists are going to use the footage from their archives, as well as new recordings of constantly changing elements and structures being constructed and collapsing, freezing and melting. Although playful, the installation aims at bringing awareness about our every day’s activities’ far-reaching consequences to the environment.

More information about the Synthesis project: wrocenter.pl/synthesis

 

Kaisu Koivisto (FI), Anna Nykyri (FI)

Anna Nykyri is a visual artist, documentary film director and screenwriter, she lives and works in Helsinki. Nykyri holds an MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Art and an MA in Choreography from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London. Nykyri uses moving image to create documentary films, cinematic video and sound installations, and choreographic environments. Her works often explore political and corporeal themes, covering questions of gender, power, and control.

Kaisu Koivisto is a graduate of the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, where she lives and works. Her practice, rooted in the environment of her activity and inspired by the harshness of the northern climate, raises questions about the human relationship with nature and traces that technologies leave in it. She is interested in the past sites of geopolitical attention – abandoned military and industrial complexes, eroding and coexisting with biological life. She works with video, photography, drawing, sculpture and installation. Impermanence and transformation of materials link her screen works to spatial realizations, geometry, ornament, organicity are elements of her signature aesthetic.

Paweł Janicki (WRO)

Paweł Janicki — a member of the program team at WRO Art Center — draws mainly on the achievements of music, contemporary and media art and posthumanist practice — but he constructs forms different from the existing ones. He engages a wide spectrum of techniques, approaches and protocols: creates works using synthetic senses, programming techniques — also in the modern, cognitive incarnation — and elements of space and material engineering. An important role in Janicki’s creativity is drawn from historical and current contexts — in particular the perceived history of art and something that could be called the history of thinking.

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