Verbal Art is back after a short hiatus - I could not keep up with my schedule...

I have my first ever return guest on the podcast, Harriina Räinä, this time I visit her solo exhibition Volatile Shells in Hippolyte Studio in Helsinki (check Verbal Art episode 5 for my first interview with Harriina, in Helsinki Art Museum). She explains how she is continuing her research on relationships between humans and animals, currently in an ongoing three-part exhibition series with oysters as subject matter, and we get to learn a lot about oysters! We discuss how people relate differently to different types of animal remains, the practicality of protecting your soft tissue behind a hard shell, and how reflections on non-human agency is a very human approach to empathy.

Harriina's website

Harriina's Instagram

Hippolyte Gallery's website

Cité internationale des Arts residency

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I visit Ana Gutieszca in her studio in Helsinki, where she gives us a listen through her electronic music gear, and talks about her love of noise and drum machines. We also take a look at her animal drawings, and she explains how she turns her drawings into sound by using the electric conductivity of graphite and her own custom-built devices. We discuss the aspects of time and flow in music making and performance settings and share anecdotes of stage moments and musical realisations, and Ana tells about her personal history with music, from playing instruments as a child to her discovery of electronic music. We also talk about facilitating culture and running underground venues, and I realise that Ana was a founding member of Third Space (a former mini-venue in Helsinki).

The intro sound of this episode is an excerpt from Ana's track The Book of Repression and the outro sound is her track Instincts.

There are some low bass frequencies in this episode that you will only hear in headphones or with real speakers.

Ana's website

Ana's Instagram

Ana's Soundcloud

Ana on Bandcamp

Humanimal performance videos

Äänitaiteen Seura's website

Äänitaiteen Seura's Instagram

Äänitaiteen Seura's Facebook page

Third Space's website

Third Space's Facebook page

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David Lundström Nabel shows me his very large sculpture in the group exhibition Yhtäkiä - Suhduhnle in Kuva/Tila gallery in Helsinki. David explains how he transported a massive cable drum through the city and into the gallery, and talks us through his assembly of different materials and found objects. We discuss what makes a work masculine, if size matters in the exhibition space, and how the different works affect each other in a group show. We also talk about casting your own body parts, finally finding a purpose for something you have been holding onto, and how positioning of a small element can make a huge difference in the symbolic reading of the whole.

In the background, you can hear the soundscape of two works in the exhibition by Samuel Thompson-Plant and artist duo Bebetton.

David's Instagram

Yhtäkiä - Suhduhnle on Kuva/Tila's website

Yhtäkiä - Suhduhnle on Facebook

Samuel's Website

Samuel's Instagram

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I visit the group exhibition Shall we sleep on this? in Yö Galleria, curated by Chih-Tung Lin. They talk us through the works of the three artists Amanda Lono, Minjee Hwang Kim and Noora Lehtovouri, and tell us all about their curatorial process and decisions of the show. We discuss exhibitions as enduring entities, the non-linear dynamics of group shows, expectations vs. outcome, and how to curate chaos. We reflect on the role of the curator and question why some people hyphenate their title as artist-curator. We talk about what methods to employ when embodying that position, and Chih-Tung explains how they have been writing a curator-diary through this project and used the text in the exhibition to create transparency. We also get into the emotional challenges of the job, and discuss social skills, self-awareness, and the noble art of appropriate communication.

Chih-Tung's website

Chih-Tung's Instagram

Chih-Tung's Facebook profile

Minjee's website

Minjee's Instagram

Noora's website

Noora's Instagram

Amanda's website

Amanda's Instagram

Shall we sleep on this? on Facebook

Yö's website

Yö's Facebook page

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I visit Helsinki Art Museum (HAM) again, this time to see Laura Dahlberg's new sci-fi inspired solo exhibition Abiotic Variables feat. Alien Babies. Laura explains how she has used silicone to cast soft robots, and how she learned to use air as a mechanic tool. We also get to know about the crazy, lively material called liquid crystal polymer, and Laura tells the story of how she got to develop her artwork in a science lab together with PhD researchers who study the material for other applications. We discuss the future of robots and empathy, the agency of inanimate materials, and Laura tells about the emotional aspects of birthing alien art babies and giving them up for adoption. We also talk about aesthetic tropes of science fiction, and how an exhibition space can become an other-worldly experience with the use of simple ambient tools.

Laura's website

Laura's Instagram

Abiotic Variables feat. Alien Babies in Helsingin Sanomat

HAM's website

Helsinki Hacklab's website

Tampere University Chemistry Lab's Instagram

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I meet Clément Beraud in Helsinki Art Museum (HAM) where he works as exhibition technician. He talks us through the installation of selected works from Helsinki Biennial, explains the practical considerations and tells about what can go wrong in the long, delicate process of transport and re-assembly. We get an insight into the greater ecology of a large gallery and all the people involved in the production of an exhibition, and how all the different roles approach common objectives with different agendas and priorities. We talk about the absurdity of a regular object becoming a sacred artefact when put on display, and how new value and rules are applied to it in an instant when it enters the gallery space. Clément explains about the practical aspects of his job, working as a technician in many different museums and galleries around Helsinki, and how potential safety hazards and safety practices are handled. We also discuss issues of the financial structures of the art world, and some of the challenges leading to artists making careers of their side-gigs such as technician positions.

There was some electrical interference making noise on the recording, which I have cleaned and removed as much as I could without making our voices too strange. It is not constant throughout the episode! When we walk & talk through the exhibition the soundscape is fine and you can hear the sound of the artworks.

Clément's website

Clément's Instagram

Technicians' group exhibition in Gallery Pallas

HAM's website

Helsinki Biennial's website

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In this second, final part of my self-reflective solo episode, I continue to explain about my current master's thesis project: a site-specific sound art piece on cassette tape, titled The Silence of Sea Tower. I reminisce on all the challenges and wonders I have come across during this year-long engagement, talk about how this whole thing in many ways feels like one big puzzle I am trying to piece together, and I reflect on how it is like an investigation with clues and surprises and red threads. I get very poetic about the writing process and all the similarities between the sound composition and the written text, and I get into the technical details and my methods of both those processes. I also share my struggles with exhaustion and loneliness, and contemplate whether I am resting or procrastinating when I am not working. I try to explain how this auto-fictional work and isolated lifestyle has blurred the lines between fiction and reality, and how I might be performing the sound of my everyday life without realising it. In this chapter I also expand on the performance aspect of the work, a concert iteration titled Narrative Noise performed on an orchestra of old ghettoblasters, and reveal what my future plans are in that direction.

For inquiries about purchasing The Silence of Sea Tower on cassette tape, send an email to [email protected]

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For this milestone episode I thought it was a good time to check in with myself, and try another round of interviewing myself - exactly one year since the first attempt. And when I talk to myself we never end, so this is a conceptual episode in several chapters. I did two long interviews with myself in my studio in Helsinki, one in the daytime and one in the middle of the night, and then I edited parts of these recordings together as one long conversation - it ended up so long that I had to divide it into several episodes, so here is the first part of a long talk between me, myself and I about our master's thesis project The Silence of Sea Tower, an ambient noise sound art project that I self-published on cassette tape this Spring.

In this chapter I invite you into the magical realism of my studio, where I have been living and recording the sound of my surroundings the last year. I discuss the myth of neutral, objective field recording, the personality traits of kitchen appliances and the voices of tube lights, and reflect on my own role as performer in my everyday soundscape. I also explain how it feels to live in secrecy in my workspace, how I navigate the shared sounding space of the building, and how my way of listening to myself and my surroundings has changed during this project.

For inquiries about purchasing The Silence of Sea Tower on cassette tape, send an email to [email protected]

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I meet Laura Lowe in her studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, to look at her very large paintings of gloomy yet shiny, abstract landscapes. We discuss when a painting is dead or alive, the decay and resurrection of landscape painting in the era of climate change, and Laura tells how she went from self-taught artist to alchemist in the paint lab. She describes the technical process of working with structural colour (and what that even is), the difference to painting and sculpting a picture, and she tells about her long experimental process of creating iridescent paint and working with light-reflection. We talk about the practical aspects of scaling up and working from tiny samples to large canvases, and how the exhibition space affects the artwork. Laura also explains how to turn roadkill into taxidermy sculptures, and we talk a bit about coal.

Laura's website

Laura's Instagram

Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki's website

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