Steph Kretowicz (aka AQNB editor Jean Kay) presents the Somewhere I’ve Never Been broadcast on NTS radio.
The first Episode aired on May 2 and will be played once a month for the next 7 months. With excerpts from the book’s “account of loss and being alone in a self-started journey through the US, Europe and the Middle East” read out by Kretowicz and interspersed with what sound producer Kimmo Modig describes as “paranoid pop [and] vertigo soundscapes,” the project is part of forthcoming novel and live audio book Somewhere I’ve Never Been co-published by Berlin’s TLTRPreß and London’s Pool.
Kimmo Modig presents Kimmo “Pappa” Modig at Helsinki’s HAM gallery opening April 28 and running to June 11.
There is no press release as such, however the Facebook event page is continually updated with ‘kimmoscopes’ such as “Lots of cards, lots of questions, no time to make sense of it all. Try to find people you can trust who share that feeling” and “You feel comfortable being around maximum two other people,” as well as digital images from Social Anxiety Matrix series.
Steph Kretowicz (aka AQNB editor Jean Kay) is launching a novel, Somewhere I’ve Never Been, with a “live audio book” rendition of the text at London’s The Yard Theatre on May 14.
The event draws on a forthcoming podcast, audio book and radio show — also produced with Modig and accompanying the Somewhere I’ve Never Been book — to begin broadcasting on NTS Radio in late April. The multi-platform narrative, co-published by Berlin’s TLTRPreß and London’s Pool, expands on the text, which consists a cohesive selection of non-fiction essays exploring international soundscapes as an expression of heavily mediated, networked mobile environments.
The event is produced alongside The Yard’s Dan Hampson, as well as artists Sey and Levi of the Curl label and collective.
The False Walls group exhibition at Perth’s Pet Projects is opening November 6 and running to November 20.
The show features work by Liam Colgan, Tanya Lee, Quintessa Matranga and Kimmo Modigto explore social convention and collaboration from a distance through a lens of boundary, defence mechanism and personal space. During the de-install of the show there will be a text released by co-creator of Pet Projects, Andrew Varano.
Pet Projects is run by Dan Bourke, Gemma Weston and Varano and is located in an industrial area outside of the Western Australian capital’s city centre, regulating a series of events and happenings.
An ongoing project between the Helsinki-based artist and Video in Common (ViC), the event is a continuation of its first iteration, called Listen to Yourself: Sound Design Tutorial with Pappa Modig,during a residency at London’s Space in August. The performance presentation is an interactive sound design workshop, produced by both audience and artist, while running through the clichés, ideologies and political meanings of certain sonic elements.
Questioning the role of a designer in ascribing value, power and status to cultural production, the video material (produced with ViC in London) stems from a filming session around Hackney Wick, with Modig performing empty gestures in front of cameras, destined to be given meaning only at the edit.
Episode #03 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 late 2016.
Produced by Andrew Varano, episode three features Australian artist Hossein Ghaemi collaborating with his mother Nahid Ghaemi who hold a half-asleep abstract conversation, between broken Farsi and broken English, touching on the solar system, prophetic dreams and song. London-based writer Steph Kretowicz draws parallels between The Hunger Games film franchise, and neoliberal self-interests, in life and the art market in a piece read by Brad Phillips and produced by Kimmo Modig.
Berlin-based artist Max Grau speaks about working from bed and its connection to contemporary working conditions for artists, but also more personally to his experiences with depression. Finally, Penny Rafferty writes about mortality in connection with the representations and distribution of images of the digital self online.
Music interludes for this episode are provided by Perth-based artist and musician, Mei Saraswati.
Connected by a running commentary written by Kimmo Modigbetween all of the works, the exhibition explores these paradoxes and juxtapositions through work exploring the way we portray ourselves online and to others.
The website for the exhibition is designed by Fois and Beeferman, and additional text written by Fois, Snowe and Modig.
aqnb and Video in Common (ViC) are presenting screening, performance and discussion event, ‘At the Backend’ at London’s Assembly Point on May 6.
As part of the Peckham space’s ambitious artists’ moving image series, Tableaux, our Friday night presentation follows a similar event called ‘The Future Is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed’, that happened at Berlin’s Import Projects in March.
This one takes aqnb‘s pending website upgrade as a starting point, where the so-called ‘Backend’ is the space behind the screen; information is organised and categorised in the Content Management System (CMS). As we collapse and restructure the existing navigation of our own website, aqnb considers this evolution, not only as an online art editorial platform, but in terms of the broader semiotic shifts that come with networked communication, and its influence on (global) community-building and identity-formation.
Artists featured in this May 6 edition include aqnb/ViC editorial video commissions with Berlin’s Claire Tolan and Anna Zett, video works from LA’s Encyclopedia Inc., a live Skype poetry reading from Philadelphia’s Ashley Angelus Ashley and a screening of work by Kimmo Modig, as well as screening of work by Johannesburg’s Cuss Group followed by a Skype Q&A with its Geneva-based co-founder Ravi Govender.
Kimmo Modig is presenting Listen to Yourself: Sound Design Tutorial with Pappa Modig at London’s The White Building on April 29.
The Helsinki-based artist opened his SPACE residency with a “show-and-tell shop talk performance anxiety q&q event”, Living with Moneyin December of last year. It began with a “group therapy session”-cum-live sound design demo that culminated in a collaborative sound piece being produced in collaboration with his audience —specifically in response to The White Building’s location in the Hackney Wick art hub —called ‘RADIO PLAY CREATIVE INDUSTRY’ (2015), embedded below.
For this closing event, ‘Pappa Modig‘ will look at what the press release calls “key questions concerning the use of sound effects with moving objects & subjects”, such as “Does a lot of reverb always equal wealth?”, accompanied by video cameras peopled by Video in Common and an open letter exploring notions of affective labour and art production.
Hot New World Viewz is a show by Jen Chans (Jennifer Chan), Pappa Modig (Kimmo Modig), Goran Jacotey (Georges Jacotey) and Svea Holloway (Shawné Michaelain Holloway). Its work has been spread lightly. From the almost fictional press release (see between the images) in the run up to the exhibition at Dresden’s S T O R E gallery –where the reader was invited to imagine the four artists travelling through space, separately but dreaming and writing together –to the dedicated website made with, or for, or about, or in parallel to the show. Its work works like this.
Modig sends us several links. The top one is the hotnewworldviewz.com website, so it makes sense to click there first. There are some flames burning in front of a black background and at first encounter it looks like one of those domesticated Tumblr holding pages, which is there to warmly tell you with a flame that you are in the wrong place. Over the top is the phrase: “Live Your Life Creatively, One Step At A Time” and above that is a time-out message counting down from 8:00 minutes.
Scrolling through, there are four pictures that act kind of like image-emblems of places. One from the South, one from the North, one from the East, one from the West. All images included on the page feel like they are trying to say something with the least amount of speaking possible. Inclusion is a gesture in itself and the lightness of work capable by an image feels like a very present thing that is being asked. Text is interspersed throughout in separate light grey paragraphs and much of it deals with the immaterial “growing stormcloud of unwritten social knowledge”. One reads: This is what we know: if someone wants to work with you, they’ll be active. You can smell forced socializing from miles away.
Then there is a red button, which may well have remained inconspicuous on the red background had it not been for Modig’s sweet note to click on the “Proof of Labour” link. A beautiful moment just before the button, which ties together these two parallel parts of Hot New Worldz, is a screen shot of photoshop in which a photo of Chan looking up at something is layered under the words “save for web?”
The button leads to another page tabbed ‘documentation‘ and it glows in red. Or, to be more exact: the two screens, the four beer bottles lined up by the artists with their names typed on their labels, the skinny shelves each topped by a fake candle fallen down behind an unidentifiable object, and the text printed large on the wall are all photographed in S T O R E’s gallery space that is lit with red light.
Also in this part of Hot New World Viewz are a couple of gifs. One is of a looping embrace between two people in the middle of the gallery space, both holding phones as they hug. The other is of a person holding and floating some paper around while reading in the space. The gif makes the reader do a short dance. Sometimes the videos and photos taken around a “work” are tender, full of expression and more meaningful –can you catch art like this instead?
The 8:00 minutes have run out on the other tab and a LinkedIn favicon appears. I click a step back and notice one more sentence: “Sometimes you drink wine on your credit card and ask yourself if art or expression is meaningful anymore…” There is so much here. So much is made public –even the pondering of what it is to make public –and yet it is not heavy with this. The documentation tab, which I soon understand an affection towards because it won’t abandon me into LinkedIn, and is nice and permanent, has at the bottom of the page a scrolling white text that reads: “Forced to Create, Compelled to Coerce…” I keep forgetting the rest and have to look back and write it down. There is room in Hot New World Viewz to keep coming back and to understand the subtle touches between where things are and how things fix, burden or release imagination. There is room to see the red hue and the softness of the gifs. There is room to understand things incorrectly, and for you not to take words as instructional, nor weighty, which feels like the right kind of aftermath to artwork. **
The Finnish artist will be presenting the hour-long “show-and-tell shop talk performance anxiety q&q event” as part of a greater solo performance, a work-in-progress to culminate on April 2016 for his residency at SPACE.
The press release comes accompanied by a script-like written text (“K stands straight. takes time, scratches nose etc”) and an invitation that reveals the artist has “worked” as an advisor at the Finnish National Theatre, and “made” a solo contribution to the Baltic Circle International Theatre Festival “because they asked, not because theatre rules. Money does.”
A complaint often registered by members of regional art scenes is the hegemony of western-centric aesthetics and ideas centred on its own creative capitals, essentially importing and exporting art in its own image. It’s a problem that’s mirrored in other global markets, where rather than offer a platform for growing local business as promised, free trade and networked connectivity only aids in the expansion of already existing corporate monopolies.
As a London-based editor and writer visiting Helsinki, there’s a certain draw to the familiar that means any experience of art in Finland comes strongly coloured by that bias. Whether it’s in LA-based artist Amalia Ulman’s Prognostics lecture at the University of Helsinki’s Exhibition Laboratory or a particular penchant for Samantha Conlon’s tabloid and Tiqqun-referencing ‘The Young Girl Blames Herself’ (2014) at Node Gallery, mine is an interest that’s thoroughly centred on the Anglo. But then, with English being the language of the imperial artform concerned with popular culture, the internet and economics –along with how they’re all related –it’s only natural that I’d be drawn to the cross-cultural Kylie Minogue-referencing I Was Gonna Cancel by Kimmo Modig and Georges Jacotey.
Conceived and recorded in Athens where Jacotey is based, the video features the two artists lolling about a Greek beachfront crying and rapping to sloppy-slow instrumentals while a German Shepherd howls and Modig rhymes, “The ghosts of your networks/ will haunt you till the day you die”. This plays from wall-mounted speakers in the Sorbus-galleria, which is otherwise empty aside from a canine plush toy at the window and an iPad on the ceiling. With no instructions on what do and the invigilators hidden from view, it’s hard to know that the handheld mirror next to the visitor’s book is meant for watching the video rather than craning your neck and reading a flashing “G and K” on the distant screen run backwards rather than forwards.
A more lateral-thinking mind, perhaps, would read the short play-as-room-sheet that comes with the I Was Gonna Cancel lyrics and a character called “KYLIE” inflates and flies away as “DRAKE EX MACHINA” saunters into Sorbus, depressed and narcissistic, as he looks at a mirror and kicks the stuffed dog aside (“if you’re reading this it’s too late”).
Mikko Kuorinki + Carl Palm, ‘Menu (True Blue)’ (2014). Courtesy SIC Space.
Objects and their functions are things that concern the exhibition at artist-run SIC Space, a cold and concrete bunker-like structure in a defunct cargo port on the third floor of a post-industrial warehouse building. As part of the nomadic curatorial programme Ruler, “ruled” by Diego Bruno and Mikko Kuorinki, the latter’s dark blue ‘Sun Tracker’ (2015) boat cover and gray ‘Truck Carpet’ (2015), appears in the sparsely furnished and well-lit side room, along with gestural sketches and a sculpture by Ola Vasiljeva. Kuorinki and Carl Palm’s ‘Menu (True Blue)’ (2014) stands in the main room projecting its list along “Hamburgers & Tools”, “Sleep Over”, “Extra Toppings” from an LED-lit aluminium lightbox. Bruno’s Galindez (2015) video, inspired by the theatre play by Eduardo Pavlovsky questioning the social function of psychoanalysis in subjective constructions within capitalism takes the centre. Except that the back of the screen faces the entrance and the three torturers are absent as Pavlovsky himself narrates excerpts from the original text: “There cannot be a dictatorship without the complicity of civilians”.
Complicity is a point that Amalia Ulman addresses at her Prognostics lecture as she recognises the possibility for change by taking agency over, rather than mimicking, gender stereotypes as previously performed in the online artist-as-circulated-representation of Excellences & Perfections. A live narration of her recent ‘The Future Ahead’ (2014) video essay follows a PowerPoint presentation of recent work as its focus shifts away from the filtered self-mediation of a particular point of privilege to aestheticising violence in the sophisticated cinema of terror through Stock Images of War (2015).
Samantha Conlon, ‘The Young Girl Blames Herself’ (2015) @ At the party, I write words on balloons (2015). Installation view. Image courtesy Node Gallery.
Perhaps it’s a violence that can drive us together rather than apart as expressed via the At the party, I write words on balloons exhibition at Node featuring video by selected artists from the Cork-based Bunny Collective and Tampere’s Areole. Where Conlon’s images of ET interviews and Gothic Lolita’s in ‘The Young Girl…’ for the former barely crosses cultures to Hinni Huttunen’s body becoming fragmented across the H&M catalogue of ‘Koko-opas / Fitting Guide’ (2014). “The Young-Girl is good for nothing but consuming…” Conlon writes, quoting Tiqqun’s Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl in the At the Party… photocopied catalogue. The Helsinki gallery’s website quotes the Oxford Dictionary in defining its name on the About page: “Junction, intersection, interchange, fork, confluence, convergence, crossing”. Given its proximity to Russia, Estonia, the ‘east’ and its ties to the Nordic and European Unions, Helsinki presents as a uniquely integrated economy and a global art scene in kind.
Exhibition photos, top right.
The exhibitions + events mentioned ran at Exhibition Laboratory, Sorbus-galleria, Node and SIC Space, opening February, 2015.
Header image: Kimmo Modig + Jacques Lacotey, I Was Gonna Cancel (2015). Installation view. Image courtesy Sorbus-galleria.
London’s [ space ] gallery is bringing three consecutive exhibitions by artist-run spaces this month – Piper Keys and Life Gallery, and Berlin’s The Duck – running from February 7 to April 5.
Each gallery will present a two-week long show in [ space ]’s Annexe gallery, kicking off with Piper Keys, who brings a three-artist group show with Roger Ackling, Keith Farquhar and Lucy Stein, running from February 7 to February 22.
Almost as soon as Piper Keys’ show wraps up, Life Gallery takes over the space with There’s No Space in Space, a group show with Morag Keil, Caspar Heinemann and Kimmo Modig, running from February 26 to March 15, followed by Berlin’s The Duck, which will host a larger group show titled ‚dm‘, with artists Hélène Fauquet, Nik Geene, Stuart Middleton, Naomi Pearce, Eidflo, Ellie de Verdier, Ryan Siegan Smith, and Veit Laurent Kurz, and running from March 19 to April 5.
Lunch Bytes presents an all-day event, titled Structures and Textures: Sound, at Helsinki’s Sinne on June 10.
Structures and Textures: Sound explores the changes to sound brought on by digitization, its increasing presence in the contemporary art world, and how these experimentations with sound are treated in art versus music.
Berlin-based ‘non-space’, V4ULT, has launched a video archive of last year’s exhibitions on its website.
Speaking to their precept of “URL continues IRL”, and vice versa, founders and curators Anna Mikkola and Hanna Nilsson (of PWR Studio) spent the past year exploring place and our relation to it by playing with the notion of the online and offline gallery, as well as its documentation. If you click the black square in the top right hand corner of the website, links to shows by Iain Ball, Kimmo Modig, Pamela Rosenkranzand, of course, last September’s Breathing Kevlar, Perforated Skin group exhibition, among others, present yet another experience of 2013’s Adalbertstrasse space, which is set to shift elsewhere in 2014.
