Terike Haapoja turns her gaze to human at ANTI Festival
Media release 10.8.2017
The 2016 winner of ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, Terike Haapoja returns to Kuopio and ANTI Festival 19-24 September 2017 with a series of new works;
Studies on Freedom I-II and Gravitation (images).
After more than a decade of working on our relationship with nature and the nonhuman world, Haapoja is turning her gaze to the figure of the human. How are we, as people, bound to the binaries of freedom and subjectivity? Studies on Freedom is a commissioned series of works for ANTI Festival. The two studies discuss
freedom and it’s limits:
“In our society freedom is everything, the ultimate goal. Yet our freedom is conditional, subjected to rules we’ve internalized so well that guarding them becomes who we are. Void of true agency, freedom becomes a burden where all responsibility lays on the individual,”
Haapoja writes in her artist statement.
Studies on Freedom I
In collaboration with a local high school, we asked the students to write a letter to the inmates, where they can express their understanding of freedom and responsibility, norms and punishments. The letters will be read by a voluntary student class of Kuopio Prison prisoners who then in turn respond in writing.
Readings of these letters can be heard on headphones located outside a provincial courthouse, in which the level of freedom of citizens is ultimately decided. 19-23 September.
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Studies on Freedom II
consists of an interactive exchange between audience members and the artists. Audience members and the artist negotiate a rental contract where one party gives their body for the other to use for
a mutually agreed period of time.
The conditions, limits and the duration of the contract are negotiated together at The Law Office of Karvinen, Sarkkinen & Sallinen. 20-22 September.
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Gravitation
marks a turn to a more intimate, direct approach in Haapoja’s practice. The series of c. 80 photographs are born from a personal urgency that bypasses discourse. Created at fast pace during a time of severe physical and emotional distress, the images reveal moments of desire, mortality, abandonment and agency, objectification and the desire to become an object. The exhibition presents selected prints from the series alongside a preview of the upcoming publication Gravitation (2017).
Gravitation will be published in the Salon Dalhman Gallery in Berlin during the Berlin Art Week on 11th September and in the programme of ANTI Festival on 19th September. READ MORE
Terike Haapoja (FI)
Terike Haapoja is a Finnish visual artist living in New York and Inkoo, Finland. She represented Finland in the Venice Biennale 2013 with Closed Circuit – Open Duration exhibition, studying mortality and relationship between human and nature. Haapoja is the first Finnish winner of ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art. In addition, Haapoja’s and writer Laura Gustafsson’s History of Other (2012-) was awarded a national media art prize in Finland.
For more information
visit our website or contact Elisa Itkonen, elisa@antifestival, +358 50 305 2005.
Press photos: antifestival.com/en/media
ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art and the productions in Kuopio are funded by:
