Jaakko Pallasvuo

aqnb x Video in Common @ 3hd Festival, Oct 12

29 September 2016

As part of this year’s 3hd Festival programme, AQNB and Video in Common (ViC) are presenting screening, performance and discussion event, ‘Staying Present’ at Berlin’s Vierte Welt on October 12.

In referring to the title of this year’s festival topic ‘There is nothing left but the future?’ AQNB focuses on the question mark, interrogating what we actually mean by ‘the future’ and whether the past has a role in determining it: What do we gain from thinking about the future in terms of the past? And is the very notion of the future itself little more than an ideological and conceptual fallacy?

The ‘Staying Present’ program presents artists, musicians and ideas that draw on convention and tradition to comment on the contemporary condition. Artists featured in this edition include an AQNB/ViC editorial video with Klein, video and sound works from Jaakko Pallasvuo, Maxwell Sterling, Institute for New Feeling, Gary FembotEaster as well as a live Skype psychic reading from Martha Windahl.

‘Staying Present’ follows a series of events organised by the art editorial platform and video production partner ViC in London, and Los Angeles –two other key cultural centres in the AQNB network. Titled ‘The Future Is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed’, ‘At the Backend’ and ‘Accessing Economies: Engagement & Withdrawal’.

See the FB event page for details.**

Header image: Jaakko Pallasvuo, ‘Castling’ (2016). Video still. Courtesy the artist.

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The Art of Living @ Beijing / New York / Berlin, Aug 13

11 August 2016

The Art of Living is a one-night screening taking place across three venues located in Beijing, Berlin, and New York on August 13.

Venues include SCREEN and I: project space in Beijing, Artnet in New York, and at Loris in Berlin, and features videos by Michael Smith, Joshua White, Kenya Robinson, Tuo Wang, Tzuhuan Lin, Musquiqui Chihying, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Manuela Johanna Covini, Brita Thie, Lin Ke, Tan Tian, Katy Roseland, and more. 

The event is inspired by Marta Minujin, Allan Kaprow and Wolf Vostell’s 1966 staged international project “Three Countries Happening”, which took place in New York, Berlin, and Buenos Aires where some of  the happenings occurred concurrently and were aired on channel 13 in Buenos Aires. The press release states, “To celebrate this post-digital condition that has changed the way art is practiced, we will stage simultaneous screenings in New York, Beijing, and Berlin, bringing together artists living in the these art metropolises”. 

The event is meant to also address how the internet has changed and expanded studio practice into the realm of social media.

See the FB event page for more details.**

The Art of Living @ Beijing / New York / Berlin, Aug 13

Tzuhuan Lin, ‘Rubber Duck’ (2016). Video Still. Courtesy the artist.

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MSL + Jaakko Pallasvuo @ CCA Derry, Jun 4 – Jul 23

3 June 2016

Performance collective MSL (Antti Jussila and Jari Kallio) and artist Jaakko Pallasvuo are presenting joint exhibition Bridge Over Troubled Water at Londonderry’s CCA Derry, opening June 4 and running to July 23.

Showing their work for the first time in Ireland and Northern Ireland, the Finnish artists explore ideas of “queerness, nonlinear time, and climate change anxiety” with a show named after the Simon & Garfunkel album and song of the same name. That’s except that the trio reimagine the 60s singer-songwriters as time-travelling protagonists who “navigate past, present, and future post-human landscapes”.

On display will be a sculptural installation featuring painting, costumes, and props, as well as new material filmed in Finland and its northernmost, underpopulated Lapland region at the border of Sweden, Norway, Russia and the Baltic Sea.

See the CCA Derry website for details.**

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Jaakko Pallasvuo, Kuin puuton ranta… (2015) exhibition photos

27 May 2016

A solo exhibition by Jaakko PallasvuoKuin puuton ranta, jolle istahdit (‘Like the treeless shore that you sat upon’) ran from November 19 to 29, 2015, at Helsinki’s Sorbus-Galleria, combining painting, objects and text. The room embraces the chaos of a studio, where one idea threads into the next, each building on top of what was made previously.

Bright orange, pink and blue paint covers the walls in abstract shapes and brush strokes. Drawings and other immediate pieces are placed on top. ‘Wistful Watson’ (2015) is a sharpie pen drawing of a muscular man, using an A4 sheet of paper. The homemade jewellery ‘Divining Rod’ (2015) and ‘Mockingjay Pendant’ (2015) hang down from the ceiling. ‘High School Painting 2’ (2015) looks like it has been plucked from a doodle made in a school notebook and the two bits of clothing hung on the wall are titled ‘Dropout Sweater’ (2015). The one finished-looking work in the show is titled ‘Picasso Hopeful’ (2015), and has a humorous presence in the context of the rest.

Rooting itself in a consciously masculine approach to art making alongside references to fandom and popular culture, Kuin puuton ranta, jolle istahdit  suspends itself between irony and sincerity. There is no press release revealing further information, except the trailer (above) featuring footage from the installation and soundtracked by ‘Nord Amor‘ from French DnB-heavy metal band VLN (Very Long Nightmare) featuring epic EDM drops and bagpipes. There is also an accompanying text taken from a Finnish poem, also referenced in the exhibition title, with its English translation that reads:

Soi korvissani runot. Kaikki, kaikki. Alue, valtatie ja etäisyys
ei enää ole raja askelille.
Tie luokse pois

ei johda. Läheisyys
on sama tosi: uni molemmille. Rakastit vettä – vesi laulaa nyt. Suluton, vapaa, ääriänsä vailla. Kuin puuton ranta, jolle istahdit kestävät aallot tänään
kiven lailla.

– Mirkka Rekola

Poems sound in your ears. Each one, each one. Region, highway and distance
can limit the footsteps no longer.
The road to you doesn’t

lead away. Closeness
is the same truth: a dream for both.
You loved the water – now the water’s singing. Without dams, free, without limits.
Like the treeless shore that you sat upon
the waves endure today
like stone.

– Mirkka Rekola

Exhibition photos, top right.

Jaakko Pallasvuo’s Kuin puuton ranta, jolle istahdit was on at Helsinki’s Sorbus-galleria, running November 19 to 29, 2015.

Header image: Jaakko Pallasvuo, ‘Picasso Hopeful’ (2015) Install view. Courtesy Sorbus-galleria, Helsinki.

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‘A Night With Jupiter Woods’ @ Shanaynay, Feb 5

3 February 2016

‘A Night With Jupiter Woods’ is at Paris’ Shanaynayas a part of their A Night With series running throughout the month, on February 5.

“Eighteen months at sea, we are now beginning to trace the contours of what constitutes this ambiguous being, Jupiter Woods”, sighs the accompanying letter for the upcoming event, sent to Shanaynay.

Jupiter Woods will “bring forth actants” Sanna Helena Berger, Eloïse BonneviotKaren KramerJaakko Pallasvuo and Sam Smith –each of whom have worked closely in the past year with the South East London project space –by showing films by the artists, before discussing how they will continue to exist as this “ambiguous being”.

“What are the conditions in which we operate?” ask Jupiter Woods co-founders Carolina Ongaro and Hanna Laura Kaljo in their letter. It seems a timely conversation to be having in relation to preservation, integrity, risk and “unlearning” within the presentation and curatorial sides of the art world.

See the FB Event page for more details and to read the letter in full.**

Ted, Karen Kramar (2012). Courtesy the artist.
Karen Kramer, ‘Ted’ (2012). Courtesy the artist.

 

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Status Effect Episode #01 now streaming

26 November 2015

Episode #01 of quarterly podcast Status Effect is now streaming on Soundcloud, as part of a programme commissioning new long form audio pieces by artists, curators, arts writers and arts workers, running from November, 2015 to January, 2016.

Focussing on social structures within the contemporary art world, the podcast aims to explore how these collective environments are composed and navigated, and as such is interested in topics surrounding subjectivity, reprioritising, diplomacy, protocol, social anxiety, the possibility for care and empathy, social mobility and labour.

Produced by Andrew Varano, the first episode features contributions from Francis Russell, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Dan Bourke & Gemma Weston and George Egerton-Warburton, as well as music from Perth, Australia-based band Erasers.

See the Status Effect website for details. **

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Jaakko Pallasvuo @ American Medium, Oct 23 – Nov 29

20 October 2015

Jaakko Pallasvuo opens his first New York solo exhibition at Brooklyn’s American Medium with Pumpkin Spice, running from October 23 to November 29.

After recent spate of activity in London, including a solo show at Jupiter Woods and a book launch with Arcadia Missa, this most recent exhibition is introduced with a page-long third-person narrative of the banalities of Pallasvuo’s day: The coffee is pretty bad, and he didn’t get the student discount. Along with the artist’s signature sharing of his fears and insecurities—Jaakko is worried about flying, and worried about being among people there. Will they be mean? He feels slow and vague and NYC seems so vertical and sharp-edged.

Before the splattering of Pallasvuo’s thoughts is this poem by Ted Hughes. Nothing comes after.

“Nobody wanted your dance,

Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering

Drowning life and your effort to save yourself,

Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,

Looking for something to give.” 

See the exhibition page for details. **

Image courtesy Jaakko Pallasvuo.
Jaakko Pallasvuo, Scorched Earth (2015). Published by Arcadia Missa. Image courtesy the arist.
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Jaakko Pallasvuo’s Scorched Earth reviewed

28 September 2015

“How long will it take for you to recognise my brilliance?” asks Jaakko Pallasvuo, on a list numbered fifteen, under a title reading “Works”, in a book called Scorched Earth. Most of these ‘works’ are speculative, conceptual art in the form of performative text that reads in sentences like, “I listen to her talk about her work. I nod. That’s nice, I say”. Some of the immaterial pieces exist merely as a blank space on paper, next to a number that’s the sum of a section, that makes up a novel, published in a limited run of a hundred by Arcadia Missa in August.

The book of sorts –an object –consists of a collection of contemplations, fragments, online posts, chat boxes, that are cobbled together from the Finnish artist’s dawsonscreek.info Tumblr account with a quote on the cover by the blog’s namesake, Dawson Leery (“We can analyze this to death later”). Off-topic and out of context, it’s a pull quote made by a fictional character from a turn-of-the-millennium US teen drama, about an artist he doesn’t know. Because how could he? Dawson Leery doesn’t exist. But he also does. He’s an influence on Scorched Earth, along with other pop cultural constructions, Rihanna, Kanye West, Chloë Sevigny, Eddie Vedder. They all compose a highly allusive maybe-autobiographical text that’s based in the circulated image.

Image courtesy Jaakko Pallasvuo.
Image courtesy Jaakko Pallasvuo.

“The text is not the work”, insists one of Scorched Earth’s fifteen “Works”. Neither is the artwork the life that’s led; one made up of fragments filtered through a body that is odd looking, neurotic, fat, fictionalised (“either a man or a woman or then not”). Here, the online and the offline are indistinguishable, the internet is the IRL, the image, the reality. Nominating himself a kind of Saviour come to reclaim poor Post-Internet (“I want what no one else wants”) Pallasvuo disavows any idea of authenticity: “isn’t it more authentic to be inauthentic than authentic if you’re inauthentic at heart?”

Purporting to a rejection of authenticity while finding it by the very act of that rejection is as far as the irony goes, though. There’s no distance in Scorched Earth. It recognises the absurdity of its own position as a book about the art world by a persona who doesn’t feel a part of it, but also actually is. Pallasvuo might not make it into Wolfgang Tilman’s Frieze celebrity after-party, but still the open and anonymous Quaker meeting he’s been to isn’t as desirable. “The usual case is that the Wolfgangs of the world don’t want us to come in but don’t want us to leave either”. It also works the other way. As much as the artist doesn’t want to be a part of the art institution, he also kind of does.

Image courtesy Jaakko Pallasvuo.
Image courtesy Jaakko Pallasvuo.

“’Scorched earth’ is a military tactic of utter devastation and a video game, and now it’s a book”, John Beeson opens in an adulatory Afterword at the back of the book. The book in turn is a deeply personal account of the art of war in the war of art –a game that can transform a crippling self-reflexivity into a creative strength. “You take everything you’ve got, your failures and insecurities. You repurpose, repackage, relaunch and repeat until they are categorized as successes.” In the case of Scorched Earth, you write bitter fan fiction about an online troll, fantasise about the “marble and vapour” of a New York City art scene, and lambast an opinion piece on the artistic significance of a Berlin-based “friend group”.

“Competitive social spheres appeal to me”, Jaakko Pallasvuo writes, quoting an imagined art figure called ‘Brad’ who’s blowing a guy called ‘Boris’ while attesting to choosing his field for its cut-throat competition under the guise of thwarted idealism. It could be Simon Denny, Timur Si Qin, Daniel Keller, Tobias Madison, or any number of artists and people Pallasvuo names (he does so selectively) in Scorched Earth. It could even be the artist himself. (“Brad swallows”). **

Jaakko Pallasvuo’s Scorched Earth was published by Arcadia Missa Publishing in August, 2015.

Header image: Image courtesy Jaakko Pallasvuo. 

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JURASSIC PAINT (2015) exhibition photos

18 September 2015

If you wait for something long enough it’ll come back in style, and dinosaurs are coming back with a vengeance of all things though extinct. Jurassic Paint, the second online show by New Scenario, went live on their website in early June. The group exhibition, shot in the forest of Saurierpark Kleinwelka, a dinosaur park filled with life-size dinosaur models, combines “two prehistoric yet resilient species” for a collection of canvas works from eleven visual artists. 

New Scenario, founded by artists Paul Barsch and Tilman Hornig in late 2014, is a dynamic platform for conceptual, time-based and performative exhibition formats “that happen outside the real of the white cube”. With Jurassic Paint, Barsch and Hornig invite the participants to combine painting as a “creative act of the imagination” with the construction of the dinosaurs, whose likeness “emerges from fanciful and narrative processes of the human and scientific mind”. The canvas works and the dinosaurs share, as the exhibition’s press release identifies, the same ‘Lebensraum’ or living space, creating a new scenario.

Iain Ball, '(res) terbium series 3' (2015) Install view.
Iain Ball, ‘(res) terbium series 3’ (2015) Install view.

The eleven visual artists have all been asked to create a dinosaur likeness, with Zoe Barcza creating a Plateosaurus titled ‘Shred IV’, Ann Hirsch offering an Anatosaurus titled ‘My Starving Public 1998’, and Tom Davis creating a Campsognathus titled ‘Ovid-Acteaon’. The remaining artists include Scott Gelber with a Diplodocus hallorum titled ‘RothkoNetflix1’, Sayre Gomez with a Antrodemus titled ‘Thief Painting in Violet’, Martin Mannig with a Heterodontosaurus tucki titled ‘Psycho’ and Jaakko Pallasvuo with a Ornitholestes hermanni titled ‘Amusement Park’. There’s also Anselm Ruderisch‘s  Polacanthus titled ‘Voyager1’, Joshua Abelow with a Triceratops prorsus titled ‘Untitled (Witch)’, and Iain Ball with a Triceratops horridus titled ‘(res) terbium series 3’. Hornig and Barsch also contributed pieces to the exhibition with, respectively, a Ceratosaurus nasicornis titled ‘Stop Aids redux’ and a Tyrannosaurus rex titled ‘O. K.’s Time Travels (Back to the Future)’, accompanied by written contributions from Johannes Thumfart and Hendrik Niefeld. **

Exhibition photos, top right.

Jurassic Paint group exhibition went live at newscenario.net on June 11, 2015.

Header image: Zoe Barcza, ‘Shred IV’ (2014). Install view. Courtesy the artist.

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How to Sleep Faster #6 @ Arcadia Missa, Aug 27 – 29

27 August 2015

Arcadia Missa‘s How to Sleep Faster exhibition and book series launches its sixth edition, running at their London location from August 27 to August 29.

The ongoing publication and exhibition series published its first edition in 2011 and has featured some aqnb favourites throughout its five previous editions, including Jesse Darling, Paul Kneale, Huw Lemmey and Ann Hirsch in issue #4.

For its sixth edition, How to Sleep Faster asks: “How can we fuck in a way that doesn’t support a patriarchal prism and standard for sex to reflect capitalist relations? Can sex be a site for identity politics, after we are imbued with the lore and failure of the sexual ‘revolution’?” Amongst the dozens of participating artists are Amalia UlmanJaakko PallasvuoHannah Quinlan Anderson & Rosie Hastings, and Cristine Brache.

See the event page for details. **

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Zombie Routine (2015) exhibition photos

13 August 2015

Routine, habits, and domesticity, repeated actions connected to ordinary everyday life. Exo, a project, curatorial program, and exhibition space in Paris run by Antoine Donzeaud and Elisa Rigoulet, presented Zombie Routine (exhibition photos, top right) at New Galerie, running March 12 to 26, with a selection of works that seem functional, decorative and familiar.

Zombie Routine features works by Bending BindingSkye ChamberlainHadrien Gérenton, Beatrice Marchi, Jaakko Pallasvuo, and Jana Schröder. There’s a mixed media painting by Gérenton entitled, ‘Appetizer Painting (salted peanut)’ (2015) that elevates bottles from function to fine art as they gently protrude from canvases. Conversely, the artist aims to reduce the art object to the  everyday in the installation ‘Object from the hand (glass bottles)’ (2015) as said containers sit on a small table like they would in one’s home. Meanwhile, Marchi unusually abstracts a chair and removes its utility by covering it with fabric and placing an oversized pillow on it, making it impossible to sit on in ‘Tiky, Budy, Aby Furnitures (Aby)’ (2014).

Other everyday objects lose their function such as the drawn-on air cooling systems made by Bending Binding entitled, ‘Kooling Systems (VNR TOC)’ (2015) and ‘Kooling Systems (Spiralz)’ (2015). A video about cats on social media networks and a tutorial on how to learn to mold ceramics loop in the gallery next to amateur paintings, travel bags, and forgotten packs of cigarettes. They’re the “ghosts of our obsessions, our daily routine zombies”.**

Exhibition photos, top right.

Zombie Routine was on at Paris’s New Galerie from March 12 to March 26.

Header image: Bending Binding, (2015) @ Zombie Routine. Install view. New Galerie.

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Jaakko Pallasvuo @ The Royal Standard, Jul 17

15 July 2015

As part of the On Coping: A Reading for Liverpool project at Auto Italia, artist Jaakko Pallasvuo will be leading a clay workshop entitled ‘Hobby Point’ at Liverpool’s The Royal Standard on July 17 from 2:30 to 5:30pm.

The project comes as part residency, part research, and part public programme, bringing in international artists to form “emotional alliances and collective strategies” to counter the compromising social and economic pressures of the modern art world and create a shared space for exchange and support.

Pallasvuo will be hosting a workshop teaching participants to handle clay while viewing a video, accompanied by a discussion about art, about hobbies, and about “what’s fun, what’s unprofessional and what’s worth doing”. Joining him to participate in the project are a handful of other artists, including Erica Scourti and Marleen Boschen.

See the project page for details. **

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