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Distribution Catalogue 2020–2021
Single channel works have been selected for the Distribution Catalogue 2020–2021 by guest curator, Ingel Vaikla (Estonia / Belgium), together with AV-arkki’s staff.
Timo Bredenberg: Liquidity (2020|08:40)

Liquidity examines the meta-structures and language of economics. It centres around figures of speech and sayings related to the concept of fluidity, which are used to naturalise economic phenomena. The visuality of the work, created with photogrammetry, refers to both the video game Pipe Mania (1989) and J.G. Ballard’s science fiction novel The Drowned World (1962). In Bredenberg’s work, Pipe Mania’s innocent game mechanics transform into metaphors for phenomena hidden within complex systems such as tax evasion and money laundering.
Jussi Eerola: Blue Honda Civic (2020|10:45)

The romantic landscape paintings often portrayed weather condition, topography of national landscape, religious themes, spirituality of nature and hunting scenes. Blue Honda Civic is a minimalistic road movie mirroring the emotions of the driver through the landscapes (s)he has chosen to look at.
Saara Ekström: Shadow Codex (2021|12:30)

Filmed in the empty Turku County Prison, Finland, (active between 1835–2007) Shadow Codex documents the surveillance machinery, architecture and layers of messages drawn, engraved, glued and burned on the prison walls. These markings function as a double exposure: they are passages into the shadows, the darker side of a person’s psyche, but likewise represent the murky dreams of a society which, while attempting to organize a sanitized system of order, hides the “dirt” it generates.
Liinu Grönlund & Okku Nuutilainen: Observe These Words (2021|07:24)

Small endangered amphibians live their life in enclosures created by researchers. The wild and the artificial, the past and the future are simultaneously present. Should we fight against the prophecy of destruction, or should we just surrender to the apocalyptic story? What kind of realities and futures do we construct inside our minds and in the outside world?
Eeva-Mari Haikala: Eeva-Mari’s cries etc. (2020|12:22)

In the video, the artist listens to a c-cassette found from her late parents’ belongings. Her mother has recorded various situations of her first year on tape. The video work was shot in a single shot, and she hears the tape in front of the camera for the first time without knowing its contents in advance.
Marja Helander: Suodji (2020|04:25)

Shelter (Suodji) is an adaptation of an old story from Utsjoki, Sápmi, to the present. It is a legend of the director’s relative, Ovllá-Ivvár Helander, and about what he did during the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 in Utsjoki. Ovllá-Ivvár decided to fool Death and take his fate into his own hands. Today we are facing a similar threat in the form of coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic. The protagonist of the film is walking in Ovllá-Ivvár’s footsteps. But at the end, who is really who?
Honkasalo – Niemi – Virtanen Collective: Atomic (2020|11:53)

Atomic is a poetic journey, which tells the story of one particular jewel. The jewel was commissioned by the US army in 1945. The ornamental stone is radioactive Trinitite, which was born as a side product of the first nuclear test in New Mexico. In this small object merge total violence, beauty, precious, sublime and particular materials and human incompleteness.
Hannu Karjalainen: Daemon (2020|11:53)

Mysterious talking objects are having a conversation in a hostile tone – seemingly on climate change. A woman is sitting motionless in a bathtub listening. The woman embarks on a dreamlike voyage through time and space and goes through a transformation.
Yassine Khaled: Monitor Man in the Time of Pandemic (2021|18:23)

Monitor Man in the Time of Pandemic explores global crisis from the time of COVID-19 to the social instabilities in the Western world. Yassine Khaled’s Monitor Man concept aims to transgress national and physical borders by enabling new kind of interaction across virtual meeting points with six participants from three continents.
Marjo Levlin: Ellipsis (2020|28:15)

Ellipsis is a meandrous story where the monologist encounters sculpture like foam animals and a large fond stretched between a bunch of trees in a forest that archers use for target practice. The fond evokes the vision of a forestal movie screen or a theather stage with sculpture animals, making the mute and mysterious plastic animals that play the role of archery targets come alive. They become a part of history, which through the famous Disney movie ”Bambi” leads to moot sports hunting and the tradition of human and animal representation. The collage like essay film combines text and visual material in an original way and was mainly filmed in a forest in eastern Helsinki, but also at the Rabat Zoo in Morocco, at the collections of Kunstkamera in St Petersburg and, as it happened, in a remote graveyard in Astoria, OR, U.S. Furthermore, the piece consists of old stereoscopic footage.
Jaakko Pietiläinen: Shrouds Have No Pockets (2021|29:40)

N.N. is on a holiday. He’s enjoying a complimentary stay at a premium hotel accompanied by a curated menu of equally complimentary experiences. In return, N.N. is asked to take a daily trip with the iGum – a proprietary, smartphone operated device, capable of accessing, altering and recording the consciousness of its user through dental nerve access. Shrouds Have no Pockets is a post-cinematic sequel of Chris Markers La Jetée. Combining 3d-animation and filmed POV-footage it studies the relation of an assumed immediate reality and mediated experiences such as dreams, memories, games or films. Shrouds Have no Pockets shares its key themes of time, perception and memory with La Jetée and relocates them into contemporary contexts of late stage capitalism, ubiquitously circulated images and an increasingly automated visual production.
Niina Suominen: What Time Is? (2020|07:15)

The essence of our time under the magnifying glass. The starting point was to create a visually interesting and intense, kaleidoscopically abundant work that could be set together with the pioneering electric composition of Jukka Ruohomäki (b.1947). The sound material was created in 1970 with the DIMI-synthesizer designed by Erkki Kurenniemi. The film material (16mm) was shot and developed by the director with the exception of the found footage war imagery. What time is? places the experience of time in the centre of contemplation. The human figures act as reference points for meditation on the passage and ending of time. The images of war function as universal symbols reflecting the inherent violence in human nature through all eras. The work gives us a chance to reflect on the transient nature of time and the relationship of the viewer to the conflict-ridden epoch in which we live.
Maija Tammi: The Problem of the Hydra (2020|09:40)

The Problem of the Hydra is an experimental documentary film about the practical and metaphysical problems a small fresh-water polyp, known as Hydra, has caused since the 1700s to the present day. Contrary to most animals, Hydra vulgaris does not age – at all.
Maija Timonen: Correct Distance (2021|39:47)

Correct Distance gets uncomfortably close to poor boundaries, ambiguous intimacies and intergenerational antagonism. Anxieties about ageing are pitted against unmet expectations in three intertwined settings. The protagonists reach darkly humorous insights as they try to assert their narratives.
Jenni Toikka: Reel (2019|07:32)

The formal subject of Reel is memory disorder. In the work, the observed reality of the memory diseased parallels with basic questions of visual arts – image, viewing and observing. The topic is viewed as solutions in the narrative means of moving image. Events are located in a performance-like situation in which a series of actions are viewed in different ways – from a distance, with one long shot, and reciprocally – from near, utilising cuts and angles. The piece follows the structure of the disease but, despite being illogical and unchronological, it seeks to find a way to combine the pieces of the memory diseased world into a narrative and comprehensible whole.