The first publication of Framed Conversations series, Altern Ecologies. Emergent Perspectives on the Ecological Threshold at the 55th Venice Biennale, edited by Taru Elfving and Terike Haapoja, will be launched with a discussion on Thursday 8 September 5–7pm at Suvilahden Tiivistämö (Kaasutehtaankatu 1, Helsinki). Welcome!
In the Frame Espresso discussion Terike Haapoja will be accompanied by curator Jenni Nurmenniemi (HIAP), artist Mari Keski-Korsu (Pixelache), director Erich Berger (The Finnish Bioart Society) and Paavo Järvensivu (Mustarinda). The discussion will be held in English.
The new anthology sets out to map an alternative ecology of art practice and research that can be traced in the cacophonic maze that is the Venice Biennale. The state of emergency caused by the current environmental crises has drawn forth the necessity to re-evaluate the centres of gravity in our world, including the means and ends of the arts. It has become evident that the practices within contemporary art are also complicit in the current unsustainable order of things even while critically addressing it.
The Frame Espresso discussion and book launch responds to this call for a thorough rethinking, from the methods and modes of perception to the apparatuses and organizational structures of production. The discussion invites together artistic and curatorial practices arising from and invested in addressing the ecological threshold through their work in Finland. Altern Ecologies presents a number of approaches that artists are currently employing on the task of radical unraveling and complex reimagining of subjectivity and otherness, relationality and representation, codependence and communication in response to the ecological urgencies.
Growing out of the conversations following the symposium A Counter Order of Things, organised in connection to the exhibition Falling Trees in the Nordic and Finnish Pavilions in 2013, the anthology includes a selection of presentations from the symposium. A number of national pavilions from the 2013 edition of the Biennale were also invited to present their exhibitions alongside these commissioned articles.
Altern Ecologies includes contributions by Ursula Bieman, T. J. Demos, Catherine de Zegher, Taru Elfving, Anselm Franke, Simryn Gill, Terike Haapoja, Hanna Husberg, Alfredo Jaar, Harri Laakso, Antti Laitinen, Laura McLean, Tuula Närhinen, Khaled Ramadan, Henk Slager, Syrago Tsiara, and Stefanos Tsivopoulos.
Altern Ecologies launches Framed Conversations, a series of publications by Frame dedicated to drawing together a multiplicity of practices and research with a critical focus on contemporary art. The anthology is published by Frame Contemporary Art Finland in collaboration with the University of the Arts Helsinki and designed by Studio Emmi. You can order it by email: info@frame-finland.fi, or buy it in a bookstore that is open during the Museum of Nonhumanity exhibition in Suvilahti. The price of a copy is 20 euros.
The audience is invited to visit the Museum of Nonhumanity exhibition after the discussion. It is a temporary museum presenting the history of the distinction between humans and other animals. Museum of Nonhumanity is a part of History of Others, a long term project by visual artist Terike Haapoja and author Laura Gustafsson. Read more
Picture: Stefanos Tsivopoulos: History Zero, 2013, video still. (C) Kalfayan Galleries Athens – Thessaloniki. Tsivopoulos’s exhibition was seen in the Pavilion of Greece at the Venice Biennale 2014. Syrago Tsiara writes about the biennale exhibition in the Altern Ecologies publication.