Daily Disasters
December 12, 2022–January 7, 2023
Daily Disasters consists of multi-layered movement through site-specific film installations through which the visitor is invited to experience an active research site that is being constantly transformed by participatory acts. Questioning the technologies and architectures of control at work in the art economy and its educational substructures, Jack Faber’s first solo exhibition in Finland suggestively subverts it’s institutional setup. By constructively destabilizing its host through acts and images of positive disobedience, the exhibition re-appropriates various spaces in the art academy’s top floors in unexpected ways; transmuting fire escapes, floors and ceilings into calls for climatic resistance. In the works DreamWeapon (2023), Future Proof (2022) and Countermeasures (2022) cinematic narratives are constructed, manipulated, and potentially destroyed through the exhibition’s duration. As site specific film installations, they constitute an exploration of the tensions between asymmetric hierarchies and struggles for species equality. The sound art installations New Beast (2022) and Eminence (2022) survey how surveillance apparatuses are assimilated into public spaces of art institutions and academies, and their possible futures. These narratives, created by the increasing passage of visitors through the secret spaces of futuristic elevator shafts, converted concrete silos and resonating staircases, examine the ability to produce new knowledge under censorship and restrictive spatial conditions.
Daily Disasters places its participants inside the in-depth research process of the ongoing project Autonomous Animals by filmmaker and artist Jack Faber. It questions the intimate, the intimidating and the immediate which together constitute many of the current encounters of A.I. and wildlife. The exhibition examines how such encounters define and are defined by the remoteness and digitization of the surveillance and art economies. It further recognizes that they are situated at the heart of both the asymmetric activities of drones and the escalating ecological crisis. Contrasting the corporate concept that the crisis is the necessary price of progress, and that developing artificial beings requires the accelerated extinction of existing life forms, Daily Disasters strives to find other paths within their physical manifestations (like the Academy of Fine Arts building in which it takes place). Taking up participatory practices to resist these ideological structures, Daily Disasters calls for the inclusion of marginalised communities in inquiring how to use moving images and cinematic commodification in various forms as emancipatory means.
Jack Faber (b. 1978) is a Helsinki-based award-winning filmmaker and artist-researcher. In his work he investigates the security economy’s influence on the arts and its role as a climate crisis catalyst. He explores cartographies of critique through constructive disobedience practices, focusing on cinematic tropes and moving images. His interdisciplinary works act as sites of conflict and reconciliation, exploring the accelerated militarization of public spaces and their ongoing corporate annexation. Merging film, collaborative projects and installations, Jack examines possibilities of participatory engagements and interspecies equality through studies of institutional ecologies, technologies and economic structures. He sensitively uses humor and non-invasive transgression for in-depth explorations which highlight inequality and oppression. His projects have been in the center of censorship and international civil rights cases (as with the “Watchmen” trial), and been presented in the Berlinale, TFL and other venues.
The exhibition is curated by JKFR / supported by VISEK and the Kone Foundation.
