The Quest for Happiness / Gerard Byrne: In Our Time

The Quest for Happiness – Italian Art Now
The Quest for Happiness – Italian Art Now presents a selection of the most interesting Italian contemporary artists following the scarlet thread of the pursuit of happiness. The majority of them have never exhibited in Finland before.

For many of them, creativity and energy have been the answer to the economic and political crisis that struck Italy in 2008 – as well as the whole Western world. After a decade of geopolitical overturn, happiness became a value of rising importance and a remarkably popular subject in many fields: personal achievement, job contexts, academic researches, consumerism and environment protection, to name a few. 

The exhibition’s artists present through their artworks a kaleidoscopic interpretation of the concept of happiness today, touching on key topics such as spirituality and materialism, family and communities, time and nature, history and identity, politics and freedom, feelings and technologies. The show offers a chance to investigate what happiness means in contemporary art from the viewpoint of young and mid-career Italian artists who have already experienced one of the most severe political, economic and social crisis in generations.

Yuri Ancarani, Silvia Camporesi, Loris Cecchini, Federica Di Carlo, Goldschmied & Chiari, Francesco Jodice, Marzia Migliora, Matteo Montani, Okkult Motion Pictures (Alessandro Scali & Marco Calabrese), Federico Pietrella, Pietro Ruffo, Marinella Senatore, Federico Solmi and ZimmerFrei: 14 artists or groups of artists from Northern to Southern Italy, working with a variety of media (painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, performance, installation, video, new media) to form a wide and fresh spectrum of the contemporary art production in Italy in the recent years, away from the Italian clichés abroad.

The exhibition is curated by Maria Stella Bottai, Lorella Scacco and Pirjo Immonen.

Artists Loris Cecchini, Marzia Migliora, Matteo Montani and Goldschmied & Chiari are present at the exhibition opening and the press meeting in the Serlachius Museums on 25 October 2019. 

To accompany the exhibition, a catalogue in three languages has been published by Parvs Publishing Ltd.

October 25, 2019–March 29, 2020 Serlachius Museum Gösta

Gerard Byrne: In Our Time
Irish artist Gerard Byrne (b. 1969) is known for ambitious video installations and photographic projects. Works utilising documentary material, theatre and literature often challenge our understandings of the immediate past. His video installation In Our Time creates a portrait in time of the everyday routines of an American radio station and raises questions about the relationships between radio broadcasts, pop music and collective memory. 

In Our Time was commissioned for Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017 in Germany. Since then, the work has been exhibited in New York, Dublin, Vienna and Stockholm. Serlachius Museums’ exhibition is Byrne’s first in Finland. The exhibition is curated by Serlachius Museums’ Head Curator, Laura Kuurne.

Centred around the control booth of the radio station, the camera moves continuously through the meticulously realised mise en scène Byrne has created, picturing in detail the cassettes and vinyl, the microphones and speakers, alongside the various other hardware used to coalesce pop music, call-ins, news bulletins and the voice of the presenter himself, into a seamless ethereal broadcast. Of non-fixed duration, In Our Time plays back in sync with actual time of day during the museum opening hours, and as such establishes a richly complex relationship between the hidden space of the radio broadcast depicted, and the physical circumstances of the museum viewer. As with many of Byrne’s previous works, In Our Time conjoins ideas of naturalism from film, physical presence from theatre, together with the concrete temporality of radio broadcasting, into a hybrid form influenced by Bertolt Brecht. 

In Our Time is a study of radio as a model of time, from the micro level of adverts or radio jingles, to the macro level of timeless pop classics. The artist utilises and emphasises radio’s inherent tapestry-like structure where different references and songs are interwoven, and key motifs are repeated at various intervals throughout the day. Radio’s inherently rhythmic nature — from daily music or talk programmes to updates on weather or traffic repeated at symmetric intervals throughout the hour — creates a modular structure of indefinite duration, similar to the serial qualities of Minimalism. With a focus on this structure and the materiality of the radio studio and its contents, Byrne continues an ongoing interest in the legacies of minimalism, and the complex nature of how art engages its own place in time.

September 21, 2019–March 8, 2020 Serlachius Museum Gösta

Further information, image requests, notices of an intention to attend the press conference and exhibition opening: 
Susanna Yläjärvi, Information Officer of Serlachius Museums, susanna.ylajarvi [​at​] serlachius.fi, +358 (0)50 560 0156.

Press releases and press images also available at Serlachius Museums’ website: www.serlachius.fi/en/for-media/

The Serlachius Museums are open in the winter season September 1–May 31, from Tuesday to Sunday 11am-6pm.

Visiting addresses:
Serlachius Museum Gösta, Joenniementie 47, 35800 Mänttä, Finland
Serlachius Museum Gustaf, R. Erik Serlachiuksen katu 2, 35800 Mänttä, Finland