Season's greetings
Hi there! Thank you for stumbling upon this post. As the year is nearing its end, we thought it was an appropriate time to give you some Niskanen & Salo updates.
Our installation Ghost Light, a collaboration with cultural anthropologist Inkeri Aula, was presented at Teater Viirus Amphitheatre on an August evening. Placed in the middle of the outdoor amphitheatre stage, Ghost Light shared stories of interconnectedness of species and led visitors to observe the metaphorical ghosts of our environment. The audience, consisting of passersby, residents of different ages in the Jätkäsaari area, artists, researchers, and friends of art and theatre, positively surprised us with their feedback. Therefore we decided to repeat the installation in November (and of course keep the visitors warm with servings of tea). A total of 220 visitors experienced the work on two different evenings. Thank you to all participants for engaging and thought-provoking discussions at the work and to Teater Viirus for the partnership.
The repetition of contextually detached sentences with a different voice in a new environment can produce a strange sense of weirdness. Verbal expression offers ways to evoke affective associations with non-human actors in the environment, presence, and one’s own relationship to different places. (...) In realized works, authorship seems to disperse.1
The freshly-published book by Taina Kinnunen and Juhana Venäläinen ‘Kulttuurintutkimus tietämisen tapana’ (Cultural research as a way of knowing) features Inkeri Aula's article 'Keskinäisen vaikuttumisen tiede ja taide ympäristökriisien keskellä’ (Art and science of interaffectivity amidst environmental crisis), which explores sensory ethnographic and artistic approaches that blur the boundaries between the subject and the environment. Our collaborative interdisciplinary works Being There (2019), Ghost Light (2020), The Rains Are Different Now (2020), Murmurations (2020), and Garden of Becomings (2021-) are documented and viewed through a theoretical lens in the article (in Finnish).
You may now order the book both in physical and digital form via the Vastapaino bookstore.
In A Scene II, temporalities are closely tied to a place, and neither can be examined without the other. In discussions about art in public spaces, various temporalities are often outlined in relation to the life cycle of the work, the time of display, the time spent by the audience with the work, and the work’s lasting presence in collective memory. Non-human agency diversifies the range of temporalities and brings a perspective that extends beyond humans.2
In the latest issue of Tahiti - Art History as Knowledge (3/2022), you can read the beautiful text ‘Solmuissa, suhteissa, kerrostumissa’ (In knots, relations, layers) by curator Kristiina Ljokkoi. In the article, Kristiina discusses the works curated for the Helsinki Biennial 2021, which are in various ways committed to the questions proposed by the place and to the non-human agency of the place. Our work A Scene II is also included in the article. The whole Tahiti issue is great, so if you read in Finnish, take a look!
Our sound installation A Scene II, based on the rhythms of sea mark lights, has attracted almost 2000 visitors from 46 different countries in Kaivopuisto since March. The work is part of the collections of HAM Helsinki Art Museum and can be experienced every day an hour after sunset until sunrise at www.ascene.fi.
This is a good time of the year to experience A Scene II, as it’s on view for almost 17 hours at a time, from around 4 pm each day until sunrise the following morning. Vice versa, on bright summer nights, A Scene II can only be experienced for a few hours.
This autumn, we have been working on new ideas for installations and (among many things) turning our attention towards satellite networks surrounding the Earth. We have also been considering future works at a structural level–how could a large-scale media work be as lightweight as possible to move, install, and maintain in various locations globally?
Overall, the year 2022 has been a period of introspection, reading, researching, learning, and creatively exploring on a “slow flame” instead of frantically jumping from one project to another. This has been a great change of tempo for us, something we haven’t had as a duo since we started actively working together.
Season’s greetings to all! Wherever you are, we hope you have had a wonderful year, and we wish you a happy, healthy, and safe New Year 2023!
Best,
Mark and Jani-Matti
www.niskanensalo.com
contact@niskanensalo.com
Instagram: @niskanensalo
Translated from Finnish by Niskanen & Salo: Ääniteoksissa kontekstissaan irrotettujen lauseiden toistaminen eri äänellä uudessa ympäristössä voi tuottaa kummalisen outouden tunteen. Äänellinen ilmaisu tarjoaa keinoja herättää affektiivisia mielleyhtymiä ympäristön ei-inhimillisistä toimijoista, läsnäolosta ja omasta suhteesta eri paikkoihin. (…) Myös toteutuneissa teoksissa tekijyys tuntuu hajaantuvan. Aula, I. (2022). Keskinäisen vaikuttumisen tiede ja taide ympäristökriisien keskellä. In T. Kinnunen, & J. Venäläinen (Eds.), Kulttuurintutkimus tietämisen tapana VASTAPAINO. 362, 366.
https://vastapaino.fi/sivu/tuote/kulttuurintutkimus-tietamisen-tapana/4277062
Translated from Finnish by Niskanen & Salo: A Scene II -teoksessa ajallisuudet kytkeytyvät kiinteästi paikkaan, eikä kumpaakaan voi tarkastella ilman toista. Julkisen tilan taidetta koskevissa keskusteluissa luodataan usein erilaisia ajallisuuksia liittyen teoksen elinkaareen, esilläoloaikaan, yleisön teoksen äärellä viettämään aikaan ja teoksen pysymiseen yhteisessä muistissa. Ei-inhimilliset toimijuudet moninaistavat ajallisuuksien kirjoa ja tuovat mukanaan perspektiivin, joka ulottuu yli ihmisen. Ljokkoi, K. (2022). Solmuissa, suhteissa, kerrostumissa: Ei-inhimillisiä toimijuuksia Helsinki Biennaalin 2021 teoksissa. Tahiti, 12(3), 106. https://doi.org/10.23995/tht.122315