Anni Puolakka’s & Erika Roux’s Vanitas (2019, in featured image), Liinu Grönlund’s & Okku Nuutilainen’s Observe These Words (2021), and Nastja Säde Rönkkö’s Altered Breaths, Future Feelings (2019) are included in a group exhibition “Love Letters from a Burning Building”, open at Persons Project Gallery, Berlin, until September 16. The exhibition is curated by Vanina Saracino.
Anni Puolakka’s and Erika Roux’s Vanitas portrays four idle characters in the future: a singer, a what-naut, a gamer and an office building. Revolving around the characters’ observations, it wonders about the transient and often meaningless seeming nature of life.
In Liinu Grönlund’s & Okku Nuutilainen’s Observe These Words, 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?
Nastja Säde Rönkkö’s Altered Breaths, Future Feelings is a video born out of a sensibility that we are at the end of the world as we know it: current ecological, political and technological narratives and histories are volatile and unstable. A narrator from an undefined future discusses love, hope, future, beginnings, myths, environmental disasters and vanished species. The video investigates possible ends of an era, its entangled histories, open-ended narratives and flux identities. It aims to carefully glimpse into the possible futures of humankind and otherkind: the vital necessity for co-dependence and urgency to remember, preserve and act now.
Love Letters from a Burning Building, July 30 – September 16 2021, Persons Project Gallery, Berlin
More information: Persons Project Gallery