AV-arkki, Frame Contemporary Finland, Amos Rex, and Saastamoinen Foundation present a collaborative screening Relational Capacities to kick off Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities, a six-day gathering taking place from September 9–14 in Helsinki. The screening, curated by Rachael Rakes, takes place in Bio Rex on Monday, September 9, at 6:30 pm. Free admission!
Relational capacities encounters learning and communication in their many entangled transmissions. Each of the selections, located in several different places and points of view, either deals topically with the failures and complexities of language, teaching, and subjecthood; positions cinema itself as a unique and under-appreciated form for experiential understanding; or mixes both operations. This programme considers how problems of interpersonal and trans-cultural translation and subjectivity can be relayed through film practice, and positions the cinema as a space for alternative forms of multi-sensory pedagogy. Moving image art has a specific engagement with time and submersion, which in its quotidian and experimental manifestations alike, has always embraced its own ritualistic status: existing in a scene that is trance-like, flickering, captivating, set in darkness and marked by hapticity.
The programme includes six works mixing various aesthetic and narrative approaches: Laure Prouvost’s Dit Learn playfully contends with the conditions of language apprehension and the instability of object relations through a wild, hypnotic succession of image, text, and narration. Employing a keen sense of humor and curiosity, Jacqueline Goss’s How to Fix the World, takes a study of Soviet-sponsored literacy programs in 1930’s Central Asia as a jumping off point to consider cognitive formation, political indoctrination, and comparative logical regimes. Azar Saiyar’s Hey You! (in featured image) and Nazli Dincel’s Between Relating and Use both deal in creative ways with foreignness, and the subjecthood of being displaced. Saiyar’s is an immersive and musical exploration of language and individual production, while Dincel’s merges the “developmental” concepts of the transitional and transnational object in a textual and textured meditation on dislocation. With Length Sini Pelkki engages with film as a time based medium to play with cognition differently: the work experientially explores the duration of a thought, the framing of space, and what might consist of a moment. Finally, Amuletos by the anonymous and massively prolific producers of urgent cinema Colectivo Los Ingravidos is a colorful and loud celluloid explosion–the group uses techniques of hand-processing and erratic montage to subliminally transmit politics and feeling.
The screening is introduced by Rachael Rakes and includes an artist talk with Azar Saiyar and Sini Pelkki.
Rachael Rakes is a curator, critic, and teacher from New York City. Rakes is currently the Head Curator and Manager of the Curatorial Programme at De Appel in Amsterdam, the Editor at Large for Verso Books, and Programmer at Large for the Film Society of Lincoln Center—where she co-curates the annual festival Art of the Real.
From 2011-2017, she served as an Editor for the art and politics journal the Brooklyn Rail. Rakes has recently contributed criticism to Art-Agenda, Artforum, the Village Voice, and Ocula, among other publications and catalogues. She has independendly organized exhibitions and programmes for Tabakerlara (San Sebastian), SAIC (Chicago), A.I.R. (NYC), Oolite Arts (Miami), The Knockdown Center (NYC), International Studio and Curatorial Program (NYC), Malmö Konsthall, and the Hessel Museum of Art (New York).
Rakes has taught on social practice, aesthetics and documentary art at The New School and Harvard Summer School, and currently serves as Supervisor for the Sandberg Institute Critical Studies programme. From 2010-2013, Rakes was the Assistant Curator at the Museum of the Moving Image, and from 2012-2014 she co-directed Heliopolis Project Space in Brooklyn.
Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities brings together local and international arts audiences for a week of interactions and dialogues. Rehearsing Hospitalities is Frame Contemporary Art Finland’s public programme for 2019-2023.
Screening: Relational Capacities, September 9, Bio Rex, Helsinki
More information: Frame Contemporary Art Finland