How Contemporary Art Came Home
Thursday 25.9. Kuopio, Finland
Participation fee is €40. For students, unemployed and members of artists’ associations the fee is 20€. Registration by September 19th.
Registration information: Laura Lahti, +358 50 3052 005
Email: info@antifestival.com
Artists have long been drawn to the potential dramatics of domestic space. Filmmakers, painters, theatre-makers and any number of novelists have mapped our living spaces through centuries of change.
But what happens when contemporary artists move beyond description and illustration and enter these spaces, producing work in them rather than about them? What happens when artists use these private worlds as both a place to make work and a place to show work? What happens when the private becomes public as audiences, that intriguing group of strangers, enters a living space which is not their own?
It is these questions that this years artists working in private homes will have approached throughout their process. And it is these questions that this year’s seminar seeks to investigate – what happens when contemporary art approaches domestic space as a generative environment? How Contemporary Art Came Home gathers artists, writers and curators to discuss this central theme to ANTI 2008.
9.45-10am Welcome
10-10.45am HOME LIVE ART
Home Live Art is a leading creative production company in the UK specializing in innovative live events with contemporary artists and performers. Home’s Director, Laura Godfry Isaac, began the company in 1998 by using her own family house as a site for exploring the relationship between art and life through curating a series of exhibitions and performances. These unique events taking place in domestic space led to the commissioning of a wide range of art works by some of the world’s leading artists, all taking place in a living, working family home. Using your own home as a performance space allows enormous freedom, but also carries many risks personally and professionally, mostly concerned with how you manage the complex relationships between audiences, artists and family members. Jane Greenfield, Associate Producer with Home Live Art, will explore these themes using previous and current Home projects.
Jane Greenfield is a UK based artistic leader with an international reputation, working professionally for 20 years in the field of dance, performance and inter-disciplinary arts. Until 2004 she was the Artistic Director of the internationally acclaimed NOTT Dance Festival and Dance 4 National Dance Agency.
10.45-11.30am MEMOIRS OF A DOORMAT
‘Home’ has been an important theme, research subject, working place and installation site in the artwork of Lea and Pekka Kantonen for 25 years. In 1984, in collaboration with Auki (tr. Open) group, the Kantonen’s organized Auki exhibition in which the audience was allowed to participate in dance rehearsals, massages and meals in Seurasaarentie artist community. Since 1995, they have held workshops in different countries in which especially native youth have created performances about their home environment using artistic and academic methods. Since March 1990, the Kantonen’s have recorded a video dairy in their home and created installations and performances based on the material: xxx days (1992), Every moment (1994), Mother (1999), Asking for advice (2004) and Studio kitchen (2006). In her thesis Tent (2005), Lea Kantonen researched home as a theme of community art. Pekka Kantonen is working on his PhD about the video diaries in the Fine Art Academy, Helsinki. Domestic space is also the theme of an unfinished 3-monitor installation Studio Hallway (2008).
Pekka Kantonen will present clips of his video diary and ask advice from the audience on the next versions of the home installation. These conversations will be recorded on video and, if the audience collectively agrees to it, used as a part of later exhibitions and discussions.
11.30-12am coffee break
12-12.45pm HOMESICK
Curious artists Helen Paris and Leslie Hill will talk about the challenges and intimacies of working in a domestic space for small audiences. They will discuss the process of working with smell for their performance On the Scent and how smell has a very particular relationship with our sense of home. They will also talk about the role of place and placelessness in their work.
Helen Paris and Leslie Hill are artists known for their edgy humorous interrogations of contemporary culture and politics, work that has been called “as smart as it is seductive” (Irish Times). Their work embraces live performance, digital media, installation, publication, film and video. As Curious, they have produced over thirty innovative works as well as collaborations with national and international artists and companies.
12.45-1.30pm lunch break
1.30-3pm WHO NEEDS A HOME, A FAMILY – AND WHY?
The dream of a bourgeois home and nuclear family is a mirage through which capitalism keeps the consumers hardworking and obedient. If in classic aesthetics, beauty is the promise of happiness - in bourgeois politics a cute home becomes the promise of a happy family. If we aspire to home and family, what are we actually reaching for? And what do these aspirations inflict? How does art/philosophy/politics/activism react against the forceful ideal sanctifying the home and family?
’I am an artist. I am also perspectival moral relativist, atheist, vitalist, and socialist. Compulsive joker too.
I make paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, videos, installations, sculpture, performances, music, theatre, texts and other things.
For me art is the most flexible, versatile and comprehensive form of philosophy and politics.’
Teemu Mäki: Artist and Professor of Visual Art, Head of Degree Programme, University of Art and Design Helsinki, Finland. Doctor of Fine Arts 2005, Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Finland.
3 - 3.30pm Artist statement; Katherine Hymers
3.30 - 4pm Artist statement; xxx group
How living in a commity shapes artistic work
xxx group is a collective of young Finnish artists interested in process-based practices. The members of the group have lived and worked in shared domestic and work spaces. Many projects have started around the kitchen table of a community in Tampere, Finland. The group shares their views about how community living shapes artistic work.
4 - 4.30pm end discussion