Featured image: Benjamin Orlow: A Spring Bright Evening (2020)
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Elian Mikkola: Via Karelia (2021, 12:36)
Tracing back a lost identity, hidden in the forests of an abandoned war zone. How does trauma get carried on from a generation to another and is there a way to stop the cycle? The filmmaker tries to understand how to heal from the pressures of the past by searching for their grandmother’s childhood home. Taking the journey with their parents, they find themselves in a village located in the old Karelia, now a part of Russia.
David Muth & Salome Schmuki: Superposition 50x02v03 (2021, 07:21)
Black forms are successively drawn on white background. They look like letters; the beginning of a text or a message. Seemingly familiar at first, they cannot be recognised. After a set of forms is complete, the process starts over. Salome Schmuki’s and David Muth’s project Superposition explores shapes generated by a set of rules based on fragments such as strokes, arcs or circles that also writing systems consist of – systems that were developed or “evolved” in different places and over long passages of time. The specially created algorithm endlessly produces variants of writing attempts: approximations of existing letters, but with oddities, unusual turns or endings. The video is also available reversed (white lines on black background) for projections.
Mox Mäkelä: Andjust Audio (2020, 01:39:00)
The sacred satire of the “stand art” host and great stuff before they become dust. The viewer gets to tour the house of the old man, Andjust. The film reflects the twins of world literature, Gogol’s Plushkin (The Dead Souls), as well as Dickens ’Scrooge (The Christmas Carol). The film Andjust is a rare, lush and cheeky fruit in the chaos of our pure era. Its nectar can cause a glutton, accustomed to the heights of cool touring, to hit its nose in a puddle of reflections in the power of a strange burst. Andjust Audio is an audio version of an audio play movie of the same name. It is largely consistent with the film, but some of the visual elements present in the film have found their audio equivalents in the sound world. Andjust Audio is available both as a Finnish and an English version.
Anna Nykyri: In-Between (2020, 02:51)
A collage-like short film composed of photographs and moving image combines details and fragments of bodies moving in half-empty urban spaces. In-Between suggests that, while movement and touch are being restricted, we are living an emotional collective experience. Isolated, we grief collectively the world that doesn’t return to what it used to be. At the same time, empty spaces can be seen as cradles of creativity, or open stages for the future yet to come. The short film reflects on how shared grief can bring us together, closer to each other, and reduce distances between us.
Benjamin Orlow: A Spring Bright Evening (2020, 19:05)
A Spring Bright Evening is a live action animation with a musical score performed by the academic fraternety choir, Brahe Djäknar. The film is set inside a, for many, closed and secretive world that plays a formative role in contemporary society through networking and tradition-making. It shows etiquette and gestures that are codified to become signifiers of belonging. In combination with the footage, historical and contemporary stereotypes and narratives are shown and referred to, touching upon issues of identity, ethnicity, cultural heritage and class structure, while also examining the relationship between masculinity and class-aspiration. The film shows a part of society that is normalised enough to be invisible, but functions as a closed group that has turned the attributes and attire of western elitism into their tribal uniform and mode of expression.
Pink Twins: The Eternal (2021, 15:20)
Chinese classical gardens are a synthesis of a thousand years of landscaping, architecture, poetry and painting. The idealized artificial terrain of the gardens have influenced artists for centuries to create architypal landscapes images, which in turn have inspired garden design. The gardens are trancendental spaces, providing artificial landscapes and virtual oases to silence the surrounding megalopolitan overload. In their new work “The Eternal” chaos animators Pink Twins distort the views of gardens with a crystal-like caleidoscopic tunnel, adding a psychedelic layer to ancient harmonic panoramas.
Iona Roisin: Compliance (2020, 14:40)
Compliance is a poetic examination of how trauma reverberates through the years.
Azar Saiyar: Laila’s Apple (2021, 08:04)
Composed of archive footage and interviews, Laila’s Apple is a video work about childhood, growing up, learning and rules.
Pauliina Salminen: Reversals (2020, 09:05)
A choreography in an urban space shows a person trying to adapt to city structures, looking at cracks in walls and reflections, as if searching for a passage to another space. Her body movements confront the built environment and challenge gravity. Finally, the person and her movements proceed in an underwater environment where all usual points of reference disappear.
Paula Saraste: The Sleeping Man (2014, 11:03)
The sleeping man reflects the short story Unglücklichsein (1913) by Franz Kafka. The work is an experimental short film about melancholy that can be striven after but not controlled. The protagonist of the surrealistic story finds a shipwrecked man that delivers him a pearl. But in the end, even this has no meaning anymore and he can only go sleeping.
Axel Straschnoy: The Devils of Paasselkä (2021, 12:10)
The Devils of Paasselkä is a film about our relationship with the unknown. For more than three hundred years, mysterious lights have appeared floating over a lake sitting on a meteorite crater. Witnesses of the lights share their experiences while two men set out to find them.
Mika Taanila: Failed Emptiness. Time (2021, 13:48)
Suddenly there is an enormous amount of time. At first everything is possible. Anything might happen. Gradually the possible becomes impossible.
Pinja Valja: Half Full (2018, 11:15)
Half full deals with the subjectivity of truth by playing with the common saying of a cup being half empty or half full. In one channel of the work, white vases are filling up with black liquid. Simultaneously on the other channel, black vases are filling up with white liquid. The liquids overflow, turning the white vases to black and vice versa. The two video channels of the work are situated in exhibition space so that the viewer can see only one of the videos at a time (for example projected on different sides of a wall).
Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen: My Whimsical Resonance (2021, 10:00)
A stuttering musician Juuso Sintonen shows how art and playfulness help him not be so afraid of life. During the interview, he performs as a street musician and plays with textile art objects inspired by stuttering.