The Artists’ Association of Finland presents the exhibition Parallax – Geographies in Resonance, which will be on view from May 1 to July 6 2014 at Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City. The Artists’ Association of Finland promotes the interest of 3,000 professional visual artists by organising exhibitions and maintaining a Finnish Visual Artists’ Internet Registry.
The exhibition, curated by Giovanna Esposito Yussif and Marketta Haila, includes works by a total of 18 artists or artist groups working in Finland, including Adel Abidin, Cleaning Women, Veli Granö, Tommi Grönlund & Petteri Nisunen, Kalle Hamm & Dzamil Kamanger, Minna Henriksson, Sasha Huber & Petri Saarikko, IC-98, Elina Juopperi, Tellervo Kalleinen & Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, Kaisu Koivisto, Erkki Kurenniemi, Antti Laitinen, Kinobox Obscura, Seppo Renvall, Mika Taanila and Roi Vaara & Elina Vainio. As part of the exhibition’s public program, Terike Haapoja will present an intervention, The Party of Others. The exhibition’s public program also includes lectures, screenings of Finnish video works and films, documentation centre and a collaboration with Ibero 90.9 radio station, showcasing soundscapes commissioned to Finnish artists.
Parallax – Geographies in Resonance is a project with a focus on developing an exchange between artists in Finland and Mexico. By a juxtaposition of two seemingly opposed socio-political and cultural realities, Parallax offers a platform to reach beyond preconceptions and generalizations that so pervasively govern the customs of thinking. To open up space for critical questions about the realities we construct, the first phase of the project brings a landscape of Finland’s contemporaneity into resonance with the Mexican panorama.
Both Finland in Europe and Mexico in America, represent metaphoric extremes in terms of culture and environment. Their unique cultural constructs are layered by complex mechanisms, based on their specific historical and geographical boundary conditions. Both are nations whose politics, economies, and social fabrics are marked by their neighbouring countries – particularly in relation to Russia and the United States. As such, they provide a framework to examine the roles and meanings of ‘localities in flux’ in the increasingly globalized world.
The exhibition venue, Laboratorio Arte Alameda (LAA) is located in a 17th century church in the heart of Mexico City. It is an exhibition space committed to artistic innovation and the exhibition, documentation, production and research of artistic practices employing a dialogue with art and technology.
The exhibition has been supported by the National Council for Culture and the Arts of Mexico CONACULTA, Frame Visual Art Finland, the Finnish Film Foundation, the Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture AVEK, the Finnish Institute in Madrid and the Finnish Embassy in Mexico City.
More information:
Artists’ Association of Finland
Picture: Kalle Hamm & Dzamil Kamanger: Removing Defenses, 2014. HD PAL, 6 min.