Commissions
Within the Rehearsing Hospitalities public programme, Frame commissions artists to produce new artworks for its office space.
Rehearsing Hospitalities commissions offer the artists possibilities to develop their work within the programme’s context and generate for Frame’s staff and audiences at large an opportunity to learn from current artistic practices more intimately. The commissions also act as mediators between different events and content within the programme.
Artist and poet Vidha Saumya‘s poem, Reading List, painted as a wall mural, proposes a list of 96 authors from India who should be in global reading lists.
Artist Laura Soisalon-Soininen‘s Seven Recipients is an ode to various transitions and seasons that take place in life. Each of the elements have been gathered, measured, arranged, re-arranged and crocheted together while walking in the lakes and shores of Helsinki city and Uusimaa region.
Read more about the Rehearsing Hospitalities commissions below.
Vidha Saumuya: Reading List, 2019. Commissioned by Frame Contemporary Art Finland. Image Ida Enegren.
Installation, 2020.
The work of Seven Recipients is an ode to various transitions and seasons that take place in life. Each of the elements have been gathered, measured, arranged, re-arranged and crocheted together while walking in the lakes and shores of Helsinki city and Uusimaa region.
Soisalon-Soininen’s work presents, in a material form, questions of knowing and access addressed in the Rehearsing Hospitalities public programme. In her practice Soisalon-Soininen asks how performative embodiment within certain natural, spiritual and social contexts can simultaneously inform artistic practice and tacit knowledge. Her artworks become objects for hosting her deeply personal process of enquiry, where intimate memories and situated knowledge are merged with scientific formulas and observations of material environments and public spaces.
Seven Recipients is an installation composed of seven distinct artworks which inhabit the Frame office foyer. Each work offers a differing perspective: some hang from the walls reaching towards the floor, while others remain on the floor. These positions are carefully measured to mark the pitches and intervals of the artist’s journeys through the transitioning spaces of the city. In the works Soisalon-Soininen combines plant parts and various findings from walks to knitted elements, made from yarn bought in the shop below the office. Woven together these form “recipients” for holding traces and residues left from her embodied working process.
“Carried across several seasons, my process of artistic enquiry can be likened to a hymn or a prayer, one which captures the sounds, materials, steps and resting places, of an internal and external pilgrimage. The works can be read as containers for the seven sacraments of the Eastern Orthodox Church or as carriers of life.
I walk upstairs to the office and lay down the first hay. I count the steps of the stairs. I circuit the block. The office floor seems to follow the level of the highest treetop in the opposing park. I use the floor to map my access in and through this block. I direct my movements toward a blind spot made visible, and investigate the entryway to the office while taking note of the hay’s change in height and it’s ability (or inability) to find, access, and respond to it’s change in conditions.”
Laura Soisalon-Soininen
Laura Soisalon-Soininen lives and works in Helsinki and graduated with an MA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2020. Her work has been exhibited at the Exhibition Laboratory in Helsinki, Gallery Vanha Raatihuone in Turku, Artifex Textiles Galerija in Vilnius and Treignac Projet in Treignac.
Soisalon-Soininen’s works can be experienced as the material traces of embodied measurements with places she has spent time. Her works connect local materiality and language through repetitive actions such as walking (in rivers), sewing, weaving, and crafting from raw materials.
Wall mural, 2019.
“The poem, Reading List, painted as a wall mural, proposes a list of 96 authors from India who should be in global reading lists. This list is potentially endless. As I read my way through list after list, helpfully extended towards me by institutions, visiting lecturers, and seminars in Finland, I encountered many silences. And to mend those silences, these names were my instinctual response. Here, I urge you to make a new list or to add to this, those authors that you find missing in curatorial, artistic and institutional reading lists today. Because your silences will be different than mine. The layered effect of the mural is inspired by the round-the-clock construction work in cities: much of the walls in institutions hold space for voices to express and to dissent in the form of posters, graffiti, and signs.”
Vidha Saumya
Vidha Saumya is a drawer, poet, cook and bookmaker. Her recent solo exhibition Monumentless Moments: the Utopia of Figureless Plinths comprising seven books of poems and a Reader, was on view at MAA-tila project Space, Helsinki in March 2020. Vidha Saumya’s poem and wall mural Reading List was the first work in a series of artistic commissions at Frame Contemporary Art Finland’s office space within the context of the Rehearsing Hospitalities public programme 2019-2023. She has read her poems in festivals and seminars such as Baltic Circle Festival and Runoviikko Poetry Festival, amongst others. She is a founding member of the Museum of Impossible Forms – a cultural centre located in Kontula, East-Helsinki, and is currently working on the project Paper, pulp, words, books: recipes for counterculture rebellion supported by Taike, Finland.