Chronicles and Compositions/Compositions and Calculations
January 13–March 14, 2021
Kohta is a privately initiated kunsthalle in Helsinki. We offer three exhibitions in the first half of 2021.
The current exhibition, open through March 14, is in fact two presentations woven into one: Chronicles and Compositions, with nine videos by Michel Auder (France/US, 1944), and Compositions and Calculations, with six woven images by Outi Martikainen (Finland, 1962).
Auder is a fixture on the international circuit. Thousands of hours of video have been preserved from his life in America, after 1969. This exhibition—Auder’s first in Finland—contains films made with footage from 1971–2018.
“Chronicles” is a term that Auder has often used for his documentary-style work. Chronicle/Chelsea Girls with Andy Warhol 1971–76 (1994), a revealing portrait of the Godfather of pop art, is a prime example of Auder’s method of being in the right place at the right moment—and with the right people. The Seduction of Patrick (1979) is masterfully improvised comedy by the likes of Viva Superstar, Gary Indiana or Taylor Mead, while Annie Sprinkle (1981–84) is a hilariously uninhibited portrait of the performance artist in her earliest incarnation as a porn star.
“Compositions” refers to the meticulously edited works Auder has been making (with a cunningly thrown-together feel) since the 1980s. Among others, we show TV America (1984) and what is often considered his masterpiece, Voyage to the Center of the Phone Lines (1993), with its soundtrack of illegally intercepted mobile phone calls. Both are descents into the maelstrom of the collective American psyche, whose long-ongoing decay is perhaps best captured by a knowledgeable outsider like Auder. The same is, unsurprisingly, true of Trumped (2018).
Martikainen trained as a textile artist and has collaborated with architects to make upholstery fabrics, acoustic panels and decorated façades. Her image-making practice presupposes both composition (like most other artists’ work) and calculation (made necessary by her use of braided ropes on computerized Jacquard looms).
Her exhibition at Kohta is dominated by two motifs. There are images of children (all 2019) articulating the symbolic significance of their activities. There are landscapes such as the panoramic seascape Utö—Yta (Utö—Surface, 2020) and the more intimate The Piper (2020), a view of an 18th-century park inside the island fortress of Suomenlinna in Helsinki.
For the latter, and for A Dream Couple (2018, inspired by a vintage postcard of a young woman and a horse) she used reflective filaments and collaborated with programmer Aapo Rista to create a singular viewing experience. Looking at these pictures through a makeshift mask decked out with a LED strip, you see shimmering lights no one else around you will notice.
Studio Kukkapuro has kindly lent chairs by Yrjö Kukkapuro for this exhibition. Michel Auder is represented by Karma International in Zurich. Outi Martikainen is represented by Lokal Helsinki.
On March 24 we open among, within, a duo exhibition by Finnish artists Magdalena Åberg (1972) and Anna Tahkola (1983). Among their shared interests are critical subjectivity (transforming social and scientific thought into visual self-expression), gendered perception (countering explicit and implicit bias towards female concerns and narratives in art) and, not least, figuration (deploying the human body as visible social presence and revealed inner reality).
Åberg’s prime medium is oil on wood, but she also shows glazed ceramic pieces which, like her paintings, become variations on the shapes of human organs. For some years, she has been reworking Western anatomical illustrations, primarily sourced from 19th-century manuals, into painterly meditations on the organic, health and disease. Åberg’s practice privileges visual temperature and texture over informational content and context. Her most recent paintings veer into the abstract and the cross-cultural, loosely referencing plates by Japanese woodcutter Aoki Shukuya for the medical treatise Kaishi Hen (The Analysis of Cadavers) published in Kyoto in 1772.
Tahkola, whose dominant mode of articulation is graphite on paper, will also execute an on-site wall painting based on the distortions of organic form she often employs in her figurative work (and on the colors of Kohta’s cement floors). Her large-scale drawings channel not just the powers that images of the naked body generally have but particularly the porousness of any drawn boundary between the human figure and the natural world. In Tahkola’s drawings, the agency of stones and plants around a forest pond equals that of the bathers submerged in its waters. Rather than merely echoing the shape of these bodies, their reflections in the waves seem to prefigure and determine them.
Kohta’s summer exhibition, opening on June 2, is Consumer by Miriam Bäckström (Sweden, 1967). She emerged as a conceptual photographer in the late 1990s (participating in numerous international exhibitions, among them Harald Szeemann’s first Venice Biennale in 1999) and would soon be counted among the leading Nordic artists of her generation. During the last 15 years she has worked with immersive film and theater projects, writing, directing and editing works like Kira Carpelan (2007), Motherfucker (2012) and Som man brukar säga (As the Saying Goes, 2014–17). The latter, based on the idea of competition among theatrical characters, will be shown at Kohta.
Bäckström also works with large, photographically based tapestries, usually of silk, woven in computerized Jacquard looms as autonomously hung images, wall panels fitted into built environments or radiant, colorful skins for sculptural geometric shapes, mostly destined for public spaces. For the exhibition at Kohta, she is developing a new line of “consumer tapestries,” both flat images and sculptures with textile claddings, which are smaller and easier to accommodate in contemporary living rooms.
The Council responsible for Kohta’s programming consists of its director, Swedish-born curator Anders Kreuger, Finnish artists Magdalena Åberg, Martti Aiha, Thomas Nyqvist, Nina Roos and Hans Rosenström and Polish-English filmmaker and lecturer Richard Misek. Kohta has a staff of two: the director and the gallery manager Mia Dillemuth.
