Saturday, December 5, 2015

Äkkigalleria 36 Kaamos a short film by Katie Goodwin

In closure of the year 2015, Äkkigalleria brings you one last event : the short film "Kaamos" by Katie Goodwin. 
This event will take place in the ti-la2016 space on Thursday the 17th of December at 5pm and 7pm.
After each viewing, Äkkigalleria organizers will lead an open discussion accompanied by glögi and festive munchies.
The duration of the film is about 30 minutes.
The event is free of charge, but bcause there is limited space in ti-la2016, please reserve your seat at (akkigalleria (at) gmail (dot) com)


 

 Kaamos
Kaamos was filmed on 16mm by London based artist Katie Goodwin whilst she was on a HIAP residency on Suomenlinna Island for 3 months over the winter of 2014-15.
Kaamos explores the struggle between a modern urban life and an inherent need to connect with nature. The film weaves together a series of darker moments with lighter observations on cultural difference unwinding a tale of a turbulently psychological experience. The second part follows the artist to Lapland to experience the Kaamos. As if in respite for the lack of sun, the Aurora Borealis appears.
The minimalist soundtrack was made in collaboration with Lappi sound artist Janne Similä, who accompanied Goodwin for part of the filming.
Kaamos and the HIAP residency were funded by the Australian Council for the Arts and British Council/Art Council England’s International Aritst Development Fund.

Project blog: lightnessfilm.tumblr.com

About the Artist
Katie Goodwin is a London-based artist (UK/AUS) and graduate of Goldsmiths and Wimbledon College of Art. She has previously exhibited in galleries and film festivals worldwide, including Tate Modern, ICA & Barbican in London; Site gallery & S1 Artspace, Sheffield, UK; CAST, Hobart & MADA gallery, Melbourne, Australia and National Museum, Trinidad and Tobago. Her first solo show at ArtLacuna, London in 2013 screened the Wellcome Trust funded film Small Wonders,
nominated for Best Documentary at London Short Film Festival in 2015. She has had several solo screenings and exhibitions in 2015 including at Temporary Arts Project, Southend and Bohunk
Institute, Nottingham, both UK and Gallery Augusta, Suomenlinna. Other previous residencies include at Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2011 and a second Finnish trip to AARK, Korpo in summer 2015.

www.katiegoodwin.com

Images from Äkkigalleria 35 – Portable Walls by Christian Nicolay & Ya-chu Kang

coming soon.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Portable Walls – Christian Nicolay & Ya-chu Kang, Äkkigalleria 35

 

Äkkigalleria 35

Portable Walls: Christian Nicolay & Ya-chu Kang
Vaasankatu 10, Jyväskylä
28. – 31.10.2015
open 11–19, and 11–16 on Saturday
0 PA160821-1 copy
Ya-chu Kang
Christian Nicolay and Ya-chu Kang are multimedia, visual artists who work together in a range of materials. Both artists utilize found material of the everyday, producing works ranging from the various topographical landscapes of Nicolay's mixed media paper drawings to Kang's multi layered textile and fiber art and their reconstructions of objects into sculptural forms. Throughout this exhibition the artists’ individual and collective works will examine cultural boundaries and social constructions of identity as well as how we individually know ourselves in a growing global fabric increasingly becoming crisscrossed and blurred.
The work created in Jyväskylä for Äkkigalleria 35, focuses on issues that have recently been at the forefront in current social and political debates including:
Borders and Boundaries
Borders without Boundaries
Diaspora
Spatial histories
Temporal Permanence
Cultural landscape
Cultural mosaic
Perpetual Intersections
The artists approach their work with these subjects in mind to create a new body of work. Allowing the viewer to experience these difficult issues from the visceral and intellectual perspective of art.

Important dates

Thursday, October 22nd, at 2pm at the Craft Museum of Finland

A lecture on traditional texiles from different continents and the use of textiles in her work, by Ya-chu Kang.

Tuesday, October 27th, at 7pm at Äkkigalleria, Vaasankatu 10

Opening celebration of Portable Walls exhibition. Presenting new work made exclusively in Jyväskylä by Christian Nicolay and Ya-chu Kang.
All Äkkigalleria events are open to the public and free of charge.
More information:
Anna Ruth
akkigalleria@gmail.com
0 DSCF4346 copy
Christian Nicolay

port·a·ble walls

1, a temporary or nomadic shift serving to enclose, divide, protect or change ones identity (i.e.: your identity shifts depending on where you are). 2, To adapt to ones surroundings. 3, What is destroyed is reborn (i.e.: A wall is meant to set a barrier from one area to another, but making it portable means you have to set it up and take it down each time). 4, Fluctuating re-occurrences. 5, Paradigm shift. 6, A person who creates more than one identity, traces of digital footprints, profiles and usernames. 7, Cultural landscapes that become crisscrossed and blurred from globalization, shifting borders, war, geo-politics, digital revolution, travel, re-location, etc. 8, paying attention to the constant flux of rules, regulations, definitions, checks and changes on privacy laws and the ability to relearn what is learned.

Bio

Christian Nicolay & Ya-chu Kang started collaborating in 2010 at the Playwrights Theatre Centre (Candahar Bar Project, Clamour and Toll) in Vancouver BC Canada with a sound performance based on morning rituals and habits from Western and Eastern cultures. Nicolay and Kang’s art field have included sculpture, installation, video, sound recording, performance and site-specific projects. Their research deals with the shifting polarities between Western and Eastern cultural landscapes which they define as “portable walls”, a temporary or nomadic shift serving to enclose, divide, protect or change ones identity. Issues of memory, process, space and time revolve around their portable walls explorations and how these constructions become part of their own experiences and spatial relationships.

CV

Nicolay & Kang received an artist in residence program and exhibition at the Taipei Artist Village (TAV) in Taipei Taiwan (2010) and at Äkkigalleria in Jyväskylä Finland (2015). They have exhibited their projects abroad in Italy (Sienna Art Institute 2011)(Valcellina Award International Contemporary Textile/Fiber 2012), Japan (Talganie Museum 2011), Canada (Initial Gallery 2014)(Maple Ridge Gallery 2013)(Elliott Louis Gallery 2012), Austria (Schmiede Art Festival 2012), Taiwan (Absolute Art Gallery 2015)(Yensui Lantern Festival 2015)(Museum of Medical Humanities 2012)(Songshan Culture and Creative Park 2012), Hong Kong (Art Experience Gallery 2013), Korea (SESIFF: The 5th Seoul International Extreme-Short Image and Film Festival 2013), USA (VAEFF: Video Art and Experimental Film Festival 2014)(Wayfinding Film Festival 2014), Egypt (7th Cairo Video Festival 2015) and their video Recoil received the Judges award prize from the NW Film Centre (Portland OR USA) and screened at the Portland International Film Festival (2012).

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Äkkigalleria's interview with Patrik Qvist




The interview


Äkkigalleria's transcription of the interview with Patrik Qvist
on Wednesday September 23rd, 2015.

Äkki: This is your first time to Jyväskylä, and although you have been to Finland 4 times this year, you have never been to Central Finland. What are your first impressions of Jyväskylä and Central Finland?

PQvist: It is very hilly. But it is very modern there are very little remains of old architecture that is why I asked you if this place was bombed. 


Äkki: Äkkigalleria has shown about 80 international artists in Jyväskylä but you are our first artist from one of another Nordic Country. What kinds of similarities, differences and possible collaborations do you see possible between the Nordic countries?
PQvist: It’s a very different country and to me it feels very exotic which is good and other than that there are.., latitude possibilities and similarities that would make for a lot of interesting collaboration because you have basically the same biotopes and the same basic sort of nature but as I said before the cultures are quite distinct and maybe to a non-nordic citizen it would seem very much the same but to me Finland is very different from Sweden and visa versa.

Äkki: Could you define some of that difference, is it something you could put your finger on or is it just a feeling ?

PQvist: It has something to do with.., I don’t know if I told you about this performance I did about 2 weeks ago in Vaasa. I walked through the town with a big sculpture, it took me about 4 hours and I am certain had I done that in Sweden or in New York or somewhere else, a lot of people would have come up and asked me what I was doing, or what the hell am I doing or why are you doing this and there would be a lot of people taking pictures in Vaasa nobody said anything and nobody took any pictures. So one of the differences that I find is that on street level it is a very different communication landscape and whoever I have approached and talked to, they have been very nice but it is a question of initiative. I don't know if it is shyness or a sense of letting other people- or minding your own business basically but I find it a bit daunting. I am used to going half way and then have other people meet me half way. I do a lot of performance art in public places and it seems you would need a bigger hammer here.


Äkki (Juho)Does the performance when (if) nobody takes pictures. I asked one Finnish performance artist-, because now a days when you see a performance, you have 20-30 people taking photos when one artist is doing a performance, and I asked him does the performance happen any more if you don’t have this kind of documentation?


PQvist: It is an interesting question because, I like attention, I am a sucker for it basically. 
On the other hand most of the performances I have recently been done have been out in nature with no audience and no crew and just me.., and I am filming this. And it has been a very rewarding experience, to be doing something when you know no one is going to see this and of course I do document it so I do show it at some later point at a gallery or show or something but you know when you are doing things in an urban context part of it is or should be the possibilities of interaction with the audience and a lot of times that audience will be incidental like passers by people on the street but it is different ways of working I guess. 

Äkki: I was looking through your website and i came across a work Last year the actor/performance artist Shia LaBeouf showed a performance piece entitled “I am sorry” at an art gallery in LA. I am aware of this project because a young Finnish artist Nastja Rönkkö collaborated with LaBeouf for this project. the bigger questions i have is that today, do artists have need to apologize being touched on I am assuming you both are coming from very different places but I couldn’t help make a connection with this work and your work with a similar title “I am so sorry”. Do you think the similarity of titles indicates a larger need that artists have to apologize for the physical, emotional and spiritual state of the world today? 

PQvist:  I am not familiar with the work by Shia Labeouf ’s which i should be I guess but
what is she sorry about?

Äkki: Basically the piece is, he is a hollywood actor who began to do some performance pieces. and basically it was a piece where he sat in a room crying with a paper bag over his head and invited people to come and sit with him. and more about the project i don’t know ..

PQvist: No. I don’t think artists need to apologize. My ”I'm so sorry” is an apology to nature rather than to other people and the apology is very personal on one hand and pretty general on the other. The general part is that I am sorry that I am a human being and that I am partaking in this mess that we see here.  On the other hand, on the personal level ”I am sorry” expresses a sort of inner conflict that since I have been working with environmentally, or art geared towards environmental climate questions I find that I try to communicate these things in my artwork but in my personal life i still contribute to the problem a lot, I am too comfortable and I am too keen to have things work on a practical level to become like a hermit basically and not take airplanes and not drive my car and i think there is some.., when I started the ”I’m so sorry” pieces they bridged a gap  that I sometimes need to bridge when I don’t think art should be instrumental but i think art can be therapeutic and for me it has been a very therapeutic process to make these.
If for nothing else then my apology, once explained, and after going into a bit of detail with an audience it brings about a conversation, about where we are at and where we are at as individuals and how different people feel. Because I think what we have ended up in, is a sort of very emotional landscape when it comes to climate change and it is emotional because it touches on very basic and day to day doings and needs that we have and I find that very interesting and so I thought that the ”I am so sorry” would be a good place to start.  When you are doing something wrong the first step is to apologize, to admit that you are wrong, and the second step is to try to make amends, to set things right, so some of these ”so sorry” pieces have a part two where I perform something more symbolically than practically, but anyway, where we correct the situation of how.

Äkki: On a global lense, if it is question that a lot of people are dealing with right now from different angles right now. Admitting our place in the world, from that perspective.

Äkki (Juho): One environmentalist said that if you want to have nature you must to stay away from it,  so i think the best way to help nature is to live in downtown Stockholm. 

PQvist: I have heard that argument too, its kind of along the same lines that a lot of these eco-modernist talk about: the urban solution, that the best way to save the planet is to gather everyone in the big cities and to leave the country side alone, only to maintain parts of it for food production and then parts of it for recreational use. And I think that is a narrative that ties nicely into the whole modernist project of alienating us farther from nature and making things.. the dialog of us and them, culture versus nature I find that very hard to subscribe to. It frightens me because I think we need to go in the opposite direction. I see this happening in Sweden where local politicians will do their utmost to attract more people to the small towns and villages where people are- the young generation are moving out or going to the big cities.  And at the same time, and parallel to this, you have a government apparatus doing its utmost to gather everyone in the three big cities in Sweden and basically empty the country side. So there are these different forces going on. And yes, leaving nature alone is maybe a good idea but how about coexisting with it you know? 
We need to maybe relearn that. 

Äkki: Do you have any ideas about the future then?

Well I have a friend who is writing a book ”the future is a thing of the past” no- that is my title to it , I think his title is ”remember the future?” anyway. 
I don’t know I think it can go either way. I mean. I started doing this kind of work when I started having kids, that is the first time I started taking a serious interest in the environment. So my impulse was kind of fear based and… part of my offspring and their future and their ability to enjoy or have the same access I would say, to nature that I have but I think we have a good chance of.. I don’t know, a pretty good future if we do something radical now.
I usually say that we have outgrown our right to democracy. We no long deserve to live in a democracy because we have politicians and leaders who are elected for 4 years and even though they care about nature and the environment, they are too geared towards short sighted solutions that will get them through the next term. And so I think maybe, even thought I don’t have a good alternative to democracy, one vision I could conjure up would be a green dictatorship where somebody puts their foot down and says nobody flies, nobody drives a car, everybody has to just make do with what we have because we have enough stuff. The stuff is here. We have enough
refrigerators, spoons, whisks, parts.. to make us last for another 50 - 100 years– if we can deal with recycling and reusing in a way that is not just a sort of a middle class luxury entertainment so… 


Äkki: It seems you have lived and worked in many different cities and countries. What makes a city interesting for your work? or a place, what makes a place interesting for your work?

PQvist:  If it’s got different layers of history or surfaces that speak of different activities. I am interested in fringe areas like harbors and railroad tracks and seam line basically where residential areas becomes seam-lined industrial becomes industrial and then country side, so if a place has that sort of-  what would you call it? Weave? of different activities and different layers of activities than it is pretty much interesting to me. And on the other side of the spectrum I love places that are tremendously monotonous like the desert where there is nothing going on no people and basically only  just a flat horizon line but that is interesting in a different way.
I like cities and I like being outdoors but it needs to have either a complexity or a monotony I think.
So far Jyväskylä is, I mean, to me it is great, I live close to the river i can go to the paper plant.
It is also interesting in places that are- one activity has just left the building and another activity is getting ready to move in it is very fascinating with places that are in the the in-between stage. I guess most artists like that because it means that for a few years if you are lucky, you can move in there, find a cheap studio space, paint on the walls, whatever and then it solidifies into something more official. 

Äkki: You have approximately one week to create a new work for the International Kirkkopuisto Photography Annual here in Jyväskylä. Do you know what you are going to do? How does this kind of intense residency work for your creative process? 

PQvist: Well it’s.. I basically know what I am going to do I pretty much know I found out yesterday I think what it is that i am going to do. It’s good, I mean the short time span is good in a way, having small children I am sure you share this sentiment too, that whenever you have the time, you just get to it, there is less of sitting around staring at the wall thinking but  there is always a deadline for stuff so even if it is four months away I tend to do most of the work last minute anyway so I think it is good in a way. I have been here for what, I was here yesterday and then I came the day before, so I haven’t been been here for 48 hours yet and it feels like a week, it has been very intense.

Äkki: And now some one word answers:

Äkki: Nature 
PQvist: Space

Äkki: Process
PQvist: Walking

Äkki: Message
PQvist: Words

Äkki: Object
PQvist: Manipulate

Äkki: Place
PQvist: Bed

Äkki: Question 
PQvist: Mark 

Äkki: Movement
PQvist: Dance 

Äkki: Photography 
PQvist: Box


Thursday, September 24, 2015

Kirkkopuisto Photo Annual artist Patrik Qvist

Announcing the 2015 Kirkkopuisto Photo Annual
September 30th – October 11th
Kirkkopuisto, Jyväskylä

This year's artist is performance artist/photographer Patrik Qvist from Stockholm, Sweden.

Patrik Qvist is best known for his work focusing on human interaction with nature, bordering on activism.
 from the performance piece "I am so sorry" in Gotland
This was an activist performance against the corporation Nordkalk in defense of a natural area on Gotland called Ojnareskogen.






 Patrik Qvist during the performance piece "I am so sorry" in Gotland 

For this year's photo annual, Patrik will create a new work in Jyväskylä. The photograph series he is currently working on is a mixture of private performance in nature, documentation, installation and sculpture.

The Kirkkopuisto Photo Annual will open on Thursday October 1st at 7:30pm.
Refreshments will be served.
The event is free of charge.
Everyone is welcome.

The Kirkkopuiosto photo Annual is a collaboration with:
The Centre for Creative Photography and The City of Jyväskylä.
JKL Massive, The Craft Museum of Finland,  The Alvar Aalto Museum, The Jyväskylä Symphony, The Jyväskylä City Theatre, The Museum of Central Finland and the Jyväskylä Art Museum.




Sunday, May 31, 2015

Midnordic Cultural Days 2015 / Midnordic Cultural Prize

Äkkigalleria is proud to announce our participation in the Midnordic Cultural Days, June 1–3rd, 2015.

As recipients of the Midnordic Cultural Prize this year, we would like to thank all of you for your support/funding/collaboration through out the years, and we would especially like to thank all the artists without whom none of this would be remotely possible <3 br="">

It is an incredible honour to receive this international recognition from the Midnordic Committee.
Our humble thanks.

more information in Finnish

Saturday, May 9, 2015

Äkkigalleria 33 - Katustipendi 2015

Announcing this year's Katustipendi recipient: Jim Bachor from Chicago, USA.

Jim Bachor arrives in Jyväskylä on May 10th for a 5 day residency during which he will install two series of new streetart mosaics.



One series is being created for the Katustipendi and one as a commission from the city of Jyväskylä. The Katustipendi work will be unveiled on Saturday, May 16th at 4pm during the Yläkaupungin Yö festival.

You can follow the process of installation on Äkkigalleria's open facebook page or at #‎bachor‬ ‪#‎jimbachor‬ ‪#‎treatsinthestreets‬ ‪#‎2015potholeartinstallations‬ ‪#‎potholeart‬ ‪#‎potholemosaics‬ #äkki33 #katustipendi #yläkaupunginyö

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Äkkigalleria 32 - Kevät Egyptistä

This April we are bringing an "Egyptian Spring" to Jyväskylä with the work of 11 young Egyptian artists.


Yasime ElMeleegy – Cactus Borders

Seven out of the eleven artists will be coming to Jyväskylä to personally participate in the exhibition.
The work shown will include: photography, drawing, embroidery-drawing, installation, film, video-animation and performance.

Äkkigalleria will also organize a discussion about the effect of current politics on contemporary Egyptian art with the artists.

The exhibition will be open from Thursday the 23rd to Sunday the 26th of April.
The opening will be held on Wednesday evening, the 22nd of April, from 5–7pm.

Artist talk, discussion will take place on Sunday the 26th at 3pm.
The events are free of charge. Everyone is welcome!


Äkkigalleria 32
Kevät Egyptistä
Jyväskylä
23.–26.4.2015



Äkkigalleria 31 (eyesore)

This Äkkigalleria campaign from January 2015 went a little under the radar.




The project was organized together with a team of artists and activists from the Jyväskylä region and lasted for about 2 weeks before being dismantled by the owner(?) to make room for more advertisement!

Information about the campaign can be found in Finnish:
http://www.eyesore-palkinto.com/


The organization team is considering making this an annual event.