Artwork, know-how and nature intersect at Finland’s Espoo Museum of Fashionable Artwork

‘This present will not be solely about artwork and science, however about science that’s partly actual, partly speculative and partly imaginary,’ says curator Arja Miller of ‘In Search of the Current’ at Espoo Museum of Fashionable Artwork (EMMA) in southern Finland. She is standing in entrance of a paper bag tethered to a rope that’s ‘respiration’ out and in. Entitled Final Breath, it’s a reproduction of the bag Finnish film star Seena Sella breathes into, proven in an accompanying movie, and is by Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (whose participatory work honouring pandemic victims, A Crack within the Hourglass, An Ongoing Covid-19 Memorial, we featured in 2021). 

The brand new work is disturbing, and will likely be much more so when 85-year-old Sella passes away, however Lozano-Hemmer sees this, and former Final Breath editions in Ecuador, Canada, the US and Cuba as ‘a romantic try at capturing the presence of somebody deceased’.

Lozano-Hemmer is one in all 16 artists displaying at ‘In Search of the Current’, the second of an ongoing sequence of exhibitions that started at EMMA in 2016. The present’s title refers to Finnish writer Olavi Paavolainen’s 1929 essays on humanity in quickly altering occasions, and all of the artists discover the intersection between nature, know-how and artwork. 

‘I didn’t need it to be tough to understand. I needed to create visible experiences that you just don’t should be an skilled to grasp,’ says Miller in entrance of an summary movie by Turkish artist Refik Anadol. A pioneer within the aesthetics of information and machine intelligence, Anadol fed 90 million photographs of landscapes into AI and allowed it to interpret them in its personal distinctive approach. It’s mind-blowing and hypnotising, and completely new. As Miller factors out: ‘Anadol is creating artwork and pictures that we’ve by no means seen earlier than as a result of the tech didn’t exist.’   

A landmark of brutalist structure from the Nineteen Sixties, EMMA lends itself completely to massive, site-specific works, two of which have been made for the present. Finnish artist Raimo Saarinen constructed a vertical slope coated in vegetation that has plastic drain pipes and tubing working by means of it. His level? That what we see and consider as pure could effectively not be, and that the imprint of humanity, even whether it is hidden, is in every single place and has a huge effect on ecosystems. Earlier this 12 months, Saarinen despatched out an identical message along with his concrete Floating Island, which seems ‘actual’, regardless of being anchored off the shore of the Finnish city of Rauma.

Publish-humanistic considerations – biometric surveillance, the facility of algorithms, the co-existence of people and different beings – are widespread themes. Polish artist Agnieszka Kurant takes a speculative take a look at what geological formations may be left when we’ve consumed all of the minerals on the planet and deserted it for all times elsewhere. Her Publish-Fordite rocks are created from Fordite, a vibrant by-product from Detroit’s car-making business that appears like agate. The colorful faux ‘fossils’ symbolize the time when people made automobiles. 

In a sequence of filmed conversations, American artist Stephanie Dinkins befriends Bina48, the primary Black feminine robotic, and collectively they attempt to make sense of consciousness, feelings, household and civil rights.  

Chinese language-born artist Sougwen Chung is a pioneer in human-machine collaboration, and in a brand new work, her household of robotic arms paint her stream of consciousness, recorded whereas she was meditating. The arms, holding paint brushes, make gradual, human-like brushstrokes on paper, and remind viewers that tech doesn’t all the time should be fast-paced and frenetic.

‘All of the artists within the present ask what intelligence is, the place can or not it’s discovered and the place can it go,’ says Miller. And so they’re not simply speaking AI, human and machine intelligence, however the intelligence of nature too. That is typically hidden, misunderstood and underestimated. Within the face of large ecological challenges, this present hopes to alter these perceptions.

‘In Search of the Current’, till 15 January 2023, Espoo Museum of Fashionable Artwork, emma.fi (opens in new tab)