Welcome to join artist Maija Luutonen in conversation with writer and curator Andrew Berardini at Kiasma, Studio K, on Thursday April 19th from 5-6 pm. The event is open to all and held in English. For free entrance to the museum for the talk, please register no later than 4 pm, 18th of April by clicking this link. Tickets will be available at the front desk in the lobby by providing your name.
The conversation with Andrew Berardini and Maija Luutonen takes as a point of departure her exhibition of new work at Studio K, the first Kiasma Commission by Kordelin. Working mainly with painting on paper, Maija Luutonen’s practice often concerns spatial immersion, our relation to the built environment, and nature at every scale. Considering the surface as something transient, Luutonen addresses the relationship between time and movement; treating the works as moving images—only that they shift too slowly for the human eye or lifetime to perceive. The subject of paper itself is essential to her work, entering the space as a background and secret scroll.
The discussion is organised by Frame Contemporary Art Finland in collaboration with Kiasma, as part of the Kiasma Commission by Kordelin programme. Andrew Berardini’s visit to Helsinki is arranged by Frame together with the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCAE) Estonia.
Find the Facebook event here.
Maija Luutonen is based in Helsinki and received her MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. She has exhibited in solo exhibitions such as Draft and Float at kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga; Soon at SIC, Helsinki; and Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey at KRETS, Malmö. Selected group exhibitions include Affective Attunements at Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen; (In)visible dreams and Streams at Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius; and Dimensions of Sharing at Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen.
Luutonen has taken part in several residencies including ones in Paris and New York, and spent this past October-November in Japan. In 2012 she was awarded the Ducat Prize by the Finnish Art Society.
Andrew Berardini lives and works in Los Angeles. He is a writer of quasi-essayistic prose poems about art and other sensual subjects, and an occasional editor and curator with past exhibitions at MOCA, Los Angeles; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Castello Di Rivoli, Turin. He formerly held curatorial appointments at LAXART and the Armory Center for the Arts, and is on the editorial staff of Semiotext(e). Berardini is the author of Danh Vo: Relics (Mousse, 2015) and is currently finishing a book about colour and another about how to be an unprofessional artist.
Berardini is a regular contributor to Artforum, Spike, and ArtReview, and an editor at Mousse, Art-Agenda, Momus, and the Art Book Review. He received the Warhol/Creative Capital grant for art writers and the 221a Curatorial Grantee. He has been part of the faculty at the Mountain School of Arts since 2008 and the Banff Centre since 2014.
Photo: Maija Luutonen, Patch, 2018, part of an installation. Kansallisgalleria / Petri Virtanen