3.2.-5.3.2023
Titanik Gallery, Turku

Field Casting is an exhibition by the London-based artists Matterlugy (Helena Hunter and Mark Peter Wright). During 2019–2023 they worked alongside marine biologists at the Archipelago Research Institute on the Island of Seili to understand how the Baltic Sea is sampled, monitored and modelled in relation to local and global climate change.

The exhibition investigates scientific ‘fieldwork’ as a site and subject of study, zooming in on the practices, tools and perspectives embroiled in the production of climate data. It explores the relationship between field practice and automated data collection and highlights knowledge as an event that is materially entangled with the lives of humans and nonhumans.

Across sculpture, film and sound, Matterlurgy cast a unique assemblage of artefacts, actors and stories: the scientist body, tools and technologies of capture, processes of reading, recording and translating phenomena that often occlude apprehension.

The front space of the gallery features Professor Ilppo Vuorinen sampling plankton in the Baltic Sea. Vuorinen is filmed “throwing the line”, a posture he has performed countless times over the 40 years of his research. His hands are cast in the same position from an alginate mould, a sculptural material that includes brown algae in its ingredients. Adjacent is a film that shows a Secchi disc being immersed in water. Created in 1865 by Angelo Secchi, the black and white disc is still used today to measure the transparency of water. By lowering it into the ocean, scientists rely on the human eye for recording thresholds of vision. Amongst this assemblage is the presence of automated data and the promise and threat of digital sampling amongst the slow-phasing of scientific bodies.

In the back space of the gallery, 3D scans of Herring Otoliths (ear bones) are displayed. The voices of scientists Professor Marjut Rajasilta and Dr Katja Mäkinen filter through the air and discuss how climatic data is stored within the ear bones of fish, how they extract and interpret this information and the possible futures of the Baltic Sea. Next to this work is a text score for microscopic looking, developed with Ilppo Vuorinen, and a film that showcases the vibrant worlds of nonhumans as they are partially glimpsed through technological apparatus.

Field Casting is curated by Taru Elfving as part of the programme How do you know what you know? Exercises in Attentiveness which presents new artworks commissioned by CAA in collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute (University of Turku) in the project Spectres in Change. Since 2017, CAA has focused on nurturing the sharing of methods, protocols and rituals – some inherited or borrowed, others invented or emergent – between artists visiting the island of Seili and scientists with decades-long embedded practice in Turku Archipelago. The exhibition and the accompanying events invite wider participation in this ongoing multidisciplinary dialogue and highlight the significance of fieldwork in the face of the escalating ecological emergency.

The exhibition is produced by CAA in partnership with Titanik Gallery and the Archipelago Research Institute (University of Turku). With support from the Kone Foundation, Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland and Oskar Öflund Foundation. Thanks to Eero Merimaa and sculpture students at Turku University of Applied Sciences, Tom Ranson, and Alex Ball at the Natural History Museum in London, UK.

More information on the exhibition and Titanik Gallery here.

Events

Fri 3.2. at 15.00

Introduction to the exhibition followed by discussion about field research of environmental changes in the Archipelago Sea: How is climate data stored, for example, within the ear bones of fish? How is this information interpreted and what can it tell of the possible futures of the Baltic Sea? The artists and curator of the exhibition in conversation with professor Jari Hänninen and researcher Katja Mäkinen from the Archipelago Research Institute. The event is in English.

Sun 19.2. at 14.00

Tour of the exhibition and discussion about art-science collaboration and fieldwork on the island of Seili. Professor emeritus Ilppo Vuorinen in conversation with curator Taru Elfving. The event is in Finnish.

Bio

Matterlurgy is a collaborative practice between London-based artists Helena Hunter and Mark Peter Wright. Their work engages with the environmental sciences: its methods, processes and technologies for sensing, translating and predicting climate change/damage. Working across disciplines and media, they combine the production of artworks with co-constructed events, exhibitions and live performances. They have produced projects about air pollution, river health, waste, flooding and climate modelling. Artworks have been made in relation to sites, including a hydropower station, disused steelworks, a laboratory for ice simulation and an abandoned copper mine. More information on Matterlurgy here.

Matterlurgy discuss their practice and the collaboration with the marine biologists at the Archipelago Research Institute in this interview with CAA.

Archipelago Centre Korpoström
1.5.2022-

New works by Kalle Hamm, Flora of Seili Island and Gone with the Human, are included in the exhibition Migration curated by Sandra Nyberg at the Archipelago Centre Korpoström during summer 2022. In the exhibited works, plants act as guides to different habitats and historical moments in the ongoing formation of the island, starting from the end of the last ice age and speculating towards to the future.

Flora of Seili Island and Gone with the Human are part of a larger body of work The New Pangaea, commissioned and produced by CAA in collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute in the project Spectres in Change, supported by Kone Foundation.

More information on the exhibition Migration here.

TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes
2.7.-26.9.2021

As part of the curatorial collaboration Transhemisférica, Taru Elfving and CAA were invited by curator Michy Marxuach to contribute to the exhibition For there to be a feast, the forest has got to dance at the contemporary art museum TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes in Tenerife. This resulted in the initiation of Portales, an expanding archive of posters printed with a Risograph printer in the exhibition space. Following the exhibition at TEA, the posters will become a resource to be shared between the participants and in future events.

CAA invited the following artists to contribute posters to the exhibition, while they were also encouraged to pass the invitation on to their peers: FRAUD, IC-98, Kalle Hamm & Band of Weeds, and Lotta Petronella.

“While we transform ourselves to listen to the signals and continue to open portals that connect us, we prepare for our conversation with the forest, in order to be able to not only see the full diversity of life but to also live it. Through this exhibition we invite ourselves and you to consciously and generously constellate the communication of “visual portals” and “sensual portals” and connectors of realities, beings, questions, practices and possible solutions as we walk and continue to create ways of transferring references and knowledge for decolonization.” – Michy Marxuach with Transhemisférica

Portales and the curatorial collective Transhemisférica (Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Luis Berríos-Negrón, Maria Kamilla Larsen, Taru Elfving and Michy Marxuach) have grown out of an ongoing collaboration Transhemispheric Residency* Programme TH(r*)P, supported by the Nordic Culture Point and the Nordic Cultural Foundation.

* “r” initially signified “residency”, but is now expanded to “resonance, rewilding, remediation, recognition, reconciliation, rebuilding, revolution …”

More information on the exhibition here.

18.6.-30.8.2020
Fiskars

In the meadow, the slow evolution of the distinctive local ecosystem meets the accelerating planetary changes in all their unpredictability. The time of the meadow is not solely that of the past. Rather, the meadow intertwines the diverse rhythms of change: the geological deep time, the acute decrease in biodiversity, the myriad naturalcultural histories of symbiotic relations between humans and other animals, plants, microbes, and minerals.

The meadow insists on the necessity of taking time to care, even in the face of the escalating emergency of the climate crisis. Meadows stand as a living testament of the age-old coexistence of people, small-scale farming, and wildlife. These uncultivated fields once lay at the heart of the commons. Today, conservation efforts have saved many meadow ecosystems from extinction in Finland. The meadow may attune our senses thus to the entanglement of the life and death of different species with the transformations of human cultures and technologies.

The ecosystems in and around the village of Fiskars have been significantly impacted by the developments of agriculture, forestry, mining and related industries already for centuries. Conversely, specific ways of life have been flourishing there thanks to the natural resources, such as iron ore and copper deposits, rich soil, vast forests and labyrinthine waterways. The local culture has also been shaped by close connections to the wider Baltic Sea region and beyond through migration and trade.

Starting from these local coordinates, the exhibition Meadow brought into dialogue contemporary art, craft, design, and environmental sciences. The exhibition took place both in the Copper Smithy exhibition venue and as site-specific interventions around the Fiskars village. Its production was guided by a commitment to develop ecologically and socially sustainable exhibition practices.

Meadow was curated by Taru Elfving and produced by The Cooperative of Artisans, Designers and Artists in Fiskars ONOMA. In partnership with CAA, the exhibition included a number of artists, who have been working on the island of Seili in dialogue with the Archipelago Research Institute in the CAA project Spectres in Change: FRAUD (Audrey Samson and Francisco Gallardo), Saara Ekström, Matterlurgy (Helena Hunter and Mark Peter Wright), and Kati Roover. The exhibition also presented ongoing research by artists collaborating with CAA on future programming: Luis Berrios-Negron, Antye Greie, Leena Kela, mirko nikolic, Arja Renell, Vidha Saumya & Ali Akbar Mehta, and Åsa Sonjesdotter.