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"I am experiencing a living death. My flesh is cut, bleeding and lifeless. My heartbeat slows down or comes to a stop. Time becomes erased or expanded, blending in with suffering. I am left outside the meaning of others, I am a stranger", Julia Kristeva describes the mental state of a depressed person in her book Soleil Noir (Black Sun). These feelings are also the topic of my short film Soleil Noir. The traditional continuity of film narration is interrupted in an everyday ghost story: Soleil Noir is set in places of discontinuity; in what is not shown, what is cut away, in images and memory errors, in the breaking points of a temporal continuum.
In the exhibition, an installation with a very different mood is built around the film. I will open up my artist's studio in the exhibition space, where I will re-open the work and its production process for the viewers to study, rework, tear, remix, configure and re-programme. The audience is welcome to become acquainted with my creative process in all its non-linearity and fragmentariness, to take part in the work and share their opinions about where to cut the film or simply what one considers to be worth saying in a semi-public forum. A communal installation meanders around the film, its structure being unpredictable and probably helplessly confusing and amorphous, a kind of a flea market for thoughts.
"Nothing is as violently alien to the industrialized world as incompleteness", says the art critic Nicolas Bourriaud in his work Postproduction. "What was the phase of the process of industrial production where mechanisation destroyed the last traces of human work? What is the role of modern art in this process? The forms of mass destruction destroy the object as a scenario to force it into a predictable, steerable, routine shape. We must restore the unpredictability, the insecurity, the play." Bourriaud is concerned about our need to construct myths about the work of art as a solved problem; a full stop instead of a comma, a closed object instead of an open situation.
These are the ideas I would like to develop - and in the best case, will develop - in my work. As we all know, the context is a degree show of an institution where studying is based on the artist's mysterious, usually closed studio, and on the other hand, from the studio to the finished works that are brought for everyone to see in the white cube of the gallery or another suitable space. This is also how we "graduated" students are pushed out into the streets after this exhibition to seek out our daily bread in one way or another. But how can you tell an artist in progress from a graduated artist? In a way, I am working contrary to the artist Maurizio Cattelan, who in his works constantly seems to attempt an escape from the art gallery: I am digging a tunnel back to the safety of the prison.
Soleil Noir
2010
A short film and an installation
HD Video transferred to DVD
20 min
Written & Directed by
Teemu Kivikangas
Actress
Varpu Rantala
Production
Finnish Academy of Fine Arts
Exhibition history:
Graduation Show 2010
Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Finland
In Finnish Academy of Fine Arts Graduation Show 2010 work was shown as an unfinished version, in a room with walls painted into a green board. I had copied my notes and plans on the walls and actually used it as a working space during the exhibition. Visitors could also add their own comments and questions on the walls.
Text and images (c) Teemu Kivikangas 2008-2010. All rights reserved.