Salla Tykkä’s Giant is included in the screening and performance series The Game is Not the Thing: Sport and the Moving Image at the Walker Art Center, running from October 11–November 8, 2024 in Minneapolis, USA. Spanning 13 decades of filmmaking, from pre-cinema to post-internet, guest curators Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere’s six-part series challenges the idea that the worlds of sports and art are mutually exclusive.

Giant (2014) was filmed at the famous, Romanian, Communist-era gymnastics schools of Onesti and Deva where people still train fanatically. Top young gymnasts talk about their love of the sport, their fears and dreams. The combination with archival material from the 1970s onwards reveals links between the photogenic sport and the severe, modernist architecture of the sports centres.

Salla Tykkä lives and works in Helsinki. She has been working with photography, video and film since 1996. Her work mainly deals with audiovisual memory and the power structures within the everyday visual narratives. Her works have been seen in various solo and group exhibitions in Finland and abroad. Tykkä’s films have also been shown at international film festivals. Her short film Giant won the Canon Tiger Award for Short Film at the 43rd International Film Festival Rotterdam 2014. Tykkä received the AVEK Award for Media Art in 2016.

Walker Art Center
October 11–November 8, 2024
Minneapolis, USA

More information: The Game is Not the Thing: Sport and the Moving Image

AV-arkki has promoted and distributed Finnish media art since 1989. AV-arkki’s promotional efforts have made the artists’ participation in this event possible. If you want to hear the latest
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