Erkka Nissinen
God or terror or retro dog
14 March–25 May 2015
Opening: Friday 13 March, 5pm
De Hallen Haarlem
Grote Markt 16
Haarlem
The Netherlands
This spring, Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem presents the first solo museum exhibition of Erkka Nissinen (b. 1975, Helsinki, lives and works in Hong Kong and New York). Over the past years, Nissinen has developed a body of video work and performance in which he reflects on our fragmented contemporary existence by negotiating the gap between the real and the virtual. The artist employs a highly idiosyncratic brand of absurdist humour, colliding the mundane and the grotesque in a decidedly deadpan manner.
Cultural dislocation, failing social interactions, and semantic misunderstandings are at the core of Nissinen’s narratives. His protagonists find themselves perpetually stuck in a digitally enhanced environment that imposes impenetrable and nonsensical power structures, forcing them to engage in comic violence, dwell in foolish naïveté, or resign in dull complacency. For his recent work, the artist uses palindrome titles, like God or terror or retro dog, referring to the cyclic, from-beginning-to-end-and-back-ideas featuring in many of his works.
God or terror or retro dog unfolds as a two-part exhibition, in which a monumental new commission is contextualized by a selection of existing video works. Upon invitation by the museum, the artist engaged himself in a conversation with a lesser known part of the collection of modern and contemporary art of Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem. In an immersive light and sound installation, Nissinen suggests subjective connections between paintings, sculptures and prints from the museum depots, while adopting the all-over approach of a salon-style exhibition hanging. In a darkened space, the works are activated by spotlights whose lighting sequence is triggered by key passages in a spoken monologue. Nissinen’s approach is meant to allow for a new reading of the familiar—at times irreverent and transgressive, perhaps, but also daringly offering new perspectives on objects that are generally addressed only within the narrow confines of art historical discourse.
This collection-based installation is preceded by a presentation of four earlier videos: Night School (2006), Vantaa (2007), Rigid Regime (2011), and Polis X (2012). These single screen video works present Nissinen’s distinctive conflation of performance, absurdism, musical, and philosophy. They are characterized by an inventive DIY-approach to video, combining the glossy hyper-sharpness of HD video and CGI with old-fashioned dress parties (Nissinen plays a substantial part of the roles himself) and dialogues, most of which derive their comic quality from linguistic confusion, the provocative exploitation of cultural and gender clichés, and the banal treatment of abstract philosophical concepts.
Nissinen’s work forms part of the collection of the Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem. The video installation Tilaa mass tilassa mass litassa maalit: ali tila (Material Conditions / Inner Spaces) (2013), donated by the Andaz Hotel, in co-ownership with Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, was shown in the group exhibition Superficial Hygiene in 2014.
Also on view: A Modest Proposal for Radical Bourgeoisie
The emergence of a new property-owning class laid the foundation for capitalism in the 19th century, but the new bourgeoisie also took to the creation of the first art museums. How does this civil responsibility operate nowadays, in times of neoliberal austerity? This exhibition takes place within the framework of the Netherlands-Flanders Year, and takes private collections from both sides of the border as a point of departure.
De Hallen Extra
–Thursday 2 April, 8pm: panel discussion on the responsibility of the art collector and the idea of ”radical bourgeoisie”
–Thursday 7 May, 8pm: artist talk with Erkka Nissinen
