Sara Pathirane: Leda & Friends (2023)

Discover AV-arkki’s latest acquisitions for our online archive below. For professional preview, please register to see the full-length versions.

Memories, dreams, and family ties

Minna Suoniemi: Mothering (2024)

In Mothering, an adult daughter carries her mother on her back, struggling through the forest. The chorus soundtrack repeats in a loop. Mothering refers to motherhood as an ongoing and changing active state of being and caring, not necessarily tied to biological motherhood alone. The Finnish title Äitiä (to mother) can be read from beginning to end and end to beginning. Hence, it refers to the theme of the work: the shifting dynamics of the care relationship when one’s parents are ageing.

Albert Laine & Kristiina Laine: Memories in the Clouds (2023)

Memories in the Clouds visualizes Kristina Laine’s (formerly Žičkutė) childhood memories in the Soviet Lithuania. Thoughts blend with impressions in a dream-like, painterly experimental documentary film. The film brings forth Kristina’s worldview as a child, during the vast socio-political changes of the collapsing Soviet Union. Kristina’s voice leads the audience to a journey through her fading, ephemeral memories and experiences. The film utilizes a combination of techniques: Timelapse videos of a summer sky shot on location in Lithuania, digital volumetric 3D simulation, and modern AI algorithms as animators to visualize the narration into the moving clouds.

Helena Öst: To Sell A Summer Cottage (2023)

With the selling of a summer cottage, the film opens a view of the past and the future, the story of a family and generations, breakaways, independence and loneliness.

Kati Roover’s hydrofeminist video essays

Kati Roover is Estonian-born Helsinki based multidisciplinary artist. Her practice spans across the mediums of moving image, sound, photography, painting, drawing, text and installations, draws upon and addresses a broad range of topics that are connected -– from human-non-human interactions, dialogical aesthetics, mythical storytelling, decoloniality and hydrofeminism, to the natural sciences and ecology.

Kati Roover: The Scent of the Changing Sea (2022)

The Scent of the Changing Sea is a video essay and installation that weaves together multisensory experiential knowledge and scientific observations in a poetic reflection on the possible futures of the Baltic Sea. The video essay approaches empathically the marine ecosystems and their manifold transformations.

Kati Roover: Do Rivers Really Ever End (2020)

Do Rivers Really Ever End is a poetic video essay, in which the personal, indigenous and local, mythological and scientific knowledge are combined. The video essay is an attempt to feel empathy toward these inanimate flowing ecosystems, rivers, flowing waters at the time when life giving river and freshwater ecosystems are drying, are dammed, polluted and transformed.

Kati Roover: Salt of My Eyes (2020)

Salt of My Eyes is a poetic essay film about the attempt to connect with ”the mysterious other” whose culture and life are still out of reach but who are constantly disturbed and destroyed by human actions. In the film, the artist observes the culturally complex human and whale relationship, the origin and the end of life on earth and myths and dreams of becoming wanderer of the big oceans.

Jarno Parkkima’s explorations of reality and self

Jarno Parkkima (b. 1984) lives in Helsinki, Finland and works with moving image. The questions behind his works concern a person’s private experience of lived reality. He graduated with a master’s degree in visual arts at the Department of Spatial and Temporal Art of the Academy of Fine Arts. He has held solo exhibitions of his key works and also participated in group exhibitions.

Jarno Parkkima: Fiat Lux (2023)

Images can blind or induce vision. Looking through a camera viewfinder and recording images is an experience, where one can feel intimate closeness and unsurmountable distance simultaneously. Despite the contradiction, this is movement towards something, and distance does create ideals. Screens and images – media – might be an electric extension of an inner, private realm.

Jarno Parkkima: Stage (2022)

Visual recording of the silence that occurred when venues of arts and culture were closed in 2022. How does a stage of a theatre or stalls, circle and foyer for audience look and feel, when there is no play, no performance and no audience present?

Jarno Parkkima: Obscure Twilight (2022)

”It ain’t yet night nor dark. Daylight’s direct and demanding brightness has faded. I’m surrounded by the constant flowing change of light, atmosphere and beings. Some kind of living silence. Here, there is allowance and room for my being and my nature: I can be a bit of one and another. Restlessness breaks and I melt into this nocturnal mass where all feels to be right – without forcing. In here and now all the fatigue, inability and being in wrongful manner feels like absurd experiences. In daylight, characters come across as bold, poignant, blinding and burning, yet their living and being submits to and hides from the light and mind (one should joy that nothing can be grasped). I know people who feel that they belong to twilight and who, after a long silence, have learned to speak and love language again – the uncertain words, sentences and images. To be open like a question.”

Human & non-human relationships

Annette Arlander: The Pine in the Park (2023)

For a year, between January 3rd and December 31st 2022, the artist was pondering and performing for the camera together with a pine tree growing in Kaivopuisto Park in Helsinki. First she repeated two poses and then added a third one; thus three images are from the start inserted into a larger image of the pine tree.

Jade Kallio & Remi Vesala: Lava (2023)

Lava is a love letter to things that cannot be written about: love, exciting piles of twigs, longing, a disappearing landscape, memories you can’t trust. Either writing hurts, or it is impossible to find the words. Lava is a continuation of the working group’s previous work Magma (2020). Both works deal with human relationships and ecology. The wishes for transformation, non-monogamy and boundless love, which were still partially smouldering under the surface, erupt in Lava, a video dealing with the end of a relationship.

Liinu Grönlund & Okku Nuutilainen: Modern Humans (2023)

In the video Modern Humans, a small white dog lives its everyday life in a city apartment. It wanders alone from room to room, dozes on the sofa and waits. The rain is slowly pattering on the window. Images of the dog are layered with fragments from Jean-Luc Godard’s film Le Mépris. The film’s dialogue has been subtitled as part of the work. The tensions and wishes of the human world in relation to others are reflected in the small animal, which has fallen into the role of a human’s companion and loyal friend. A moment on a rainy afternoon grows into a dream of meanings.

Sara Pathirane: Leda & Friends (2023)

In the choreography for video Leda & Friends two bird-like ones have landed on the realm of the poet Sappho on the island of Lesbos. It shows a world where bird-like ones cherish dreams, dance together with nature, love and preserve life, and brood a shared mystery: a hyacinth-coloured egg discovered by Leda. The soundscape layers Sappho’s poems into whispers from timelessness and space in the oral tradition of lyric poetry.

Leena Kela: If You Fall, We Will Fall Too (2022)

The video performance If You Fall, We Will Fall Too takes place in a primeval forest in Southwest Finland. Performance artist Leena Kela and seven performers with different ages and backgrounds have settled among the old trees. The performers move very slowly, rising and falling in different rhythms. The silence of the old conifers and the forest cover is matched by the slow movement of the human bodies, which one by one rise to a standing position and descend to the ground in a lying or squatting position.

New works from Pilvi Takala in the archive

Pilvi Takala (b. 1981) lives and works between Berlin and Helsinki. Her video works are based on performative interventions in which she researches specific communities in order to process social structures and question the normative rules and truths of our behaviour in different contexts. Her works show that it is often possible to learn about the implicit rules of a social situation only by its disruption. Her work has been shown in MoMA PS1 and New Museum, Kiasma, Palais de Tokyo, Kunsthalle Basel, Manifesta 11, Witte de With, and the 9th Istanbul Biennial. Takala won the Dutch Prix de Rome in 2011 and the Emdash Award and Finnish State Prize for Visual Arts in 2013.

Pilvi Takala: The Trainee (2008)

In The Trainee, the artist worked for a month as a trainee in the marketing department of Deloitte, an international accounting and consulting firm, where only a few people knew the true nature of the project. During the month-long intervention, an initially normal-seeming marketing trainee starts to apply peculiar working methods. Gradually she shifts from the position of someone others believe to be normal, to the object of avoidance and speculation.

Pilvi Takala: The Switch (2005)

On a Saturday afternoon two men were asked to switch teahouses for one night. Ömer from Yedikule travelled to Üsküdar while Yavuz from Üsküdar went to Yedikule. Cameras following both the men documented the swap. On their way, they talk about their relationship to their local teahouses, playing, and their experiences in the new teahouse. Even changes to routine which could be perceived as minor, can prompt a detailed reflection and ultimately an appreciation of one’s own habits.

Pilvi Takala: Women in Kahves (2005)

Women in Kahves is a multi-channel installation based on a series of interventions in Turkish teahouses, where traditionally only men spend time and play games. The artist and three Turkish women entered several teahouses to drink tea and to play a game of OKEY. A male assistant documented these actions with a hidden camera, with some of that material being used for the video piece. The work is also available as a screening version.

Pilvi Takala: With Spirit There’s No Limit (2004)

Finland has risen to become one of the top countries within international competitive cheerleading, alongside Japan and the USA. Golden Spirit is one of the main teams in Finland, having won numerous European and Finnish championships as well as taking silver at the World Championships. Takala invited Golden Spirit to perform as part of Pimeä Contemporary Art Festival in Helsinki. The team wrote and choreographed their own routines. Here we see the cheerleaders, who would normally only perform publicly as part of a competition, performing in the street over the course of two nights during the darkest time of the year.

Pilvi Takala: Amusement Park (2001)

Amusement Park is a short film in which two young girls are hanging around and watching the rides in a theme park. No words are spoken, but we witness the easy closeness of children mixed with some kind of growing awareness, or embarrassment of their physicality.

Society and resistance

IC-98: Impivaara – A New World (2024)

Brothers escape to the virgin forests of Impivaara to create a new world. An experimental imagining of Finnish national author Aleksis Kivi’s novel Seven Brothers (1870) for the 21st Century, focusing on the energetic basis of a Northern welfare state and a possible future emerging from the climate crisis.

Rosaliina Paavilainen: A Beauty Odyssey (2024)

The protagonist’s life derails as she realises that she is rewarded for youth and beauty. This conclusion plunges the protagoninst even deeper into patriarchal beauty rituals, constructing her identity and happiness around her appearance. Film exposes the harsh, hidden realities of beauty care, unveiling the unglamorous side behind polished images.

Bruno Diego: We Can Make That Teeth-Gritting Visible (2022)

We Can Make That Teeth-Gritting Visible weaves together archival images, data, judicial reports, news items, depiction of locations and a collective conversation with a neighbourhood association of El Alto city. What is condemned as an act against law can also turn out to be a space for learning. Thus appears a space in which subjectivity comes from below, from a place outside the institutions. Departing from a wave of uprising in the the city of El Alto, Bolivia, between the years 2000 and 2019, the film focuses on the usurpation and destruction of a police station. The destruction was part of the peoples uprising against the Coup d’état perpetrated in Bolivia in 2019.

Sauli Tvaltvadze: MEDIA (2022)

Video performance about mass communication. One month has passed since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. A performer filmed in Helsinki listens to radio stations in Moscow on his phone and simultaneously interprets what he hears in Finnish.

Sanna Liljander’s humane stories

Sanna Liljander is a filmmaker and visual artist who ventures on the borders of video art and cinema, focusing on human true stories. Her works have been screened widely at film festivals both in Finland and internationally and awarded, for example, the Risto Jarva Award.

Sanna Liljander: When Will The Day Break (2024)

When Will the Day Break is a romantic documentary film that travels on the borders of dreams, memories, hope and realism.

Sanna Liljander: Life On Hold (2019)

The clock ticks, and life is put on hold. Who gets to have babies and by which means?

Sanna Liljander: Miss (2015)

A child tells about a sadness which is hard to forget. Just as hard as catching a fly?

Lau Rämö’s connection-seeking animations

Lau Rämö is a media artist based in Helsinki. Their animations are a mix of found and soft materials, exploring themes related to our shared existence as animate beings. Their artistic practice is rooted in empathy, a desire to observe closely, playfulness, and finding connections. Rämö graduated with a Master of Arts degree from Aalto University in 2020.

Lau Rämö: I must alter myself into a life-form which can exist on this planet (2023)

The work feels and imagines life in an environment that is in flux, time and the water element, where it dives inside. By imitating, stumbling, flowing, taking over, hiding and shapeshifting, life re-organises itself. Again and again. A four-channel installation version of the video piece is also available by request.

Lau Rämö: Flight (2019)

Some familiar form, small and significant – an individual – takes shape in the dark. The video work pauses at this twisted flight, focusing the gaze to the cyclicity and fragility of life. The video work is viewed as a small scale projection inside a dark hut. It fits inside one person at a time.

Explorations of space

Leena Lehti: City Plan (2024)

The city condenses, compresses, develops. City Plan is an experimental short film about the city’s transformation. The film is set in Tampere, and it combines documentary super8 footage and plants collected from filming locations.

Leda Vaneva: Contingent Space 3 (2023)

Contingent Space is a series of virtual collages built up from physical parts. The viewer is guided to explore the environment through a specific route. Entering one of the spaces is similar to entering a dream. It is another layer of reality where the physical is transformed into intangible.

Algorithms, rhythms, and artificial intelligence

Sami Ala: Message in A Bottle (2024)

It is interesting to think what kind of consequences it would have if we were to get in touch with alien, human-like beings on other planets. It is interesting to think about what kind of feelings a person projects into the intellectual life they are looking for. It would be interesting especially if their civilisation was more developed than ours. Not only technologically, but also morally. Would we be ready to adopt different values ​​or would we question their values? The text of the video is compiled from text material that the artificial intelligence application has produced as answers to questions like the ones mentioned above.

David Muth: Y-Division [ ]] (2023)

The piece Y-Division [ ]] features a composition by sound artist Antti Tolvi: iterations of a distinct melodic motif are being played at slightly different speeds, resulting in a composition both harmonically simple and rhythmically complex. The generative animation by David Muth echoes the timing of the melody: minimal shapes assemble themselves in nested ways with each iteration of the motif.