Discover these recent acquisitions in our online archive! For professional preview, please register to see the full-length versions.
Documentary films and videos
Jan Ijäs: Absolute Street (2019, 03:28)
Samuel Beckett made a single work for projected cinema. The film was shot in New York in the summer of 1964. Beckett needed one exterior street scene for the opening of the film. He wanted that street image to be shot in street that he described as ”absolute street”. All images in this film are from streets where Beckett did his location scouting, looking for his ”absolute street”.
Anna Nykyri: Shifting (2019, 15:15)
“Shifting” is a short documentary dance film of three women, whose number one goal in life has been to work as a professional dancer in New York. Due to an injury, lack of resources and competitiveness of the field, their dreams are shifting into others. Yet, dance is still present in their life, because it would not let them go.
Sepideh Rahaa: A Dream That Came True Part 2 (2016, 28:28)
A Dream That Came True? is an ongoing long-term project initiated in year 2016, with multiform media productions resulting from artistic investigation and research. The project brings together personal narrations of everyday life and of migration from perspective of women in Finland who have also Southwest Asian and North African roots (politically known as the Middle Eastern region). Project intends to challenge the preconceived stereotypical perceptions of the Middle Eastern women and their gender and cultural roles in Finland. The project aims to resist the accepted norms and conventions of Western societies and privileges the perspectives of these women instead of letting them to be only a side-track in their narratives. The project questions migration as a dream from perspective of the migrant women, with an aim to reflect on their lived experiences, different ways of being, socio-cultural adaptions, resistances and resilience while offering different narratives than the existing ones. In part II, Hengameh R narrates her experiences, stories and thoughts on this subject.
Animations
Rikard Lassenius: Colophon 1 (2019, 15:00)
Colophon is a brief comment at the end of a beautiful narrative.
Rikard Lassenius: Colophon 2 (2019, 15:00)
Colophon is a brief comment at the end of a beautiful narrative.
Niina Suominen: Mikä aika on? (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.
Marja Viitahuhta: Blossom (2020, 05:32, in featured image)
A collage with animated blooming and flowers, forming new shapes due to the mirror effect placed on them, accompanied by a soundtrack composed out of sounds from the rainforests. On the one hand, the work admires the beauty, diversity, sensuality and fragility of nature, as well as it on the other hand mourns the current loss in biodiversity and our instrumentalised relation to nature. The installation version of the work is a projection on a round wooden screen. This version, with credits, has been edited for screening contexts or to be watched from screen.
Installations
Annette Arlander: Rainy Day in Rekdal – Grey Day in Rekdal (2017, 15:20)
The two-channel installation consists of two attempts at spending time together with a downy birch on the shore in Rekdal, Lofoten, on 19 July 2017 for a moment in rain and on 20 July 2017 for a day once every hour, beginning at 10 am and finishing 10 pm. The notes written during the day are added as a voice-over, as an alternative.
Heidi Kilpeläinen: Land of Dreams (2019, 84:05)
The title “Land of Dreams” is a translation of a beloved Finnish tango ‘Satumaa’, which Heidi Kilpeläinen sang during her Tango Therapy performance tour at Refugee Centres and war invalids and widows homes in Finland. On this tour, Kilpeläinen also invited the participants to sing back to her, in their own languages. Songs and encounters with people from Irak, Yemen, Syria, Afganistan, Somalia and Eritrea – to mention a few – combine with accounts of Finnish war invalids and widows in Kainuu, Finland, the last generation to remember the wars with Russia. These performances and deeply emotional meetings were filmed and edited into a three channel video installation.
Sepideh Rahaa: In Transition (2017, 13:00)
‘In Transition’ is a poetic and metaphorical approach to the concepts of migration, womanhood and resistance intertwined with identity and dreams through the act of knitting together an indirect dialogue between two women who have never met. They attempt to self-position and to explore their roots and to find the higher meaning of life. ‘In Transition’ is produced in centennial year of Finnish independency to critically address the position of the women with Middle Eastern roots in Finland.