Finnish Pavilion, Finland - Finnish Pavilion, Giardini, Castello - City of Venice
(Photo: Vidha Saumya,LongEnough,2021. Cross stitch on Aida cloth, 14 x 17.5 cm.Courtesy theartist)
Exhibition in progress from April 20th to November 26th 2024
The 60th Biennale Arte will open to the public on April 20. But on the 17th, 18th and 19th there will be the various events and collateral events that always enliven
suddenly Venetian artistic life. The awards ceremony will take place the day of opening to the public.
The title of the 60th edition of the Art Biennale is Foreigners Everywhere - Foreigners Everywhere.
The exhibition will be divided into between the Central Pavilion in the Giardini and the Arsenale, including 213 artists from 88 nations. There are 26 Italian artists, 180 first participations in the International Exhibition, 1433 works and objects on display, 80 new productions.
Go to the page of the 60th Venice Art Biennale
Curator of the 60th Venice Art Biennale
The 2024 edition is curated by Adriano Pedrosa.
Adriano Pedrosa, curator of the 60th Venice Art Biennale
– Adriano Pedrosa (born 1965) is a Brazilian curator. He is the artistic director of the São Paulo Art Museum (MASP) and the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Finnish Pavilion, Finland at 60th Biennale Arte of Venice
The title of the exhibition at the Finnish Pavilion is The pleasures we choo.
Artists: Pia Lindman, Vidha Saumya, Jenni-Juulia
Wallinheimo- Heimonen.
Curators: Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela.
Commissioner: Frame
Contemporary Art Finland.
Seat: Philippines Pavilion, Giardini - Venice
Press Release of Finnish Pavilion
The Pavilion of Finland premieres The pleasures we choose, a new multifaceted collaboration by artists Pia Lindman, Vidha Saumya, Jenni-Juulia
Wallinheimo- Heimonen, curators Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela, and
architectural designer Kaisa Sööt. Commissioned and produced by Frame
Contemporary Art Finland, the exhibition opens at the Pavilion of Finland at
the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia and speaks to
the inseparability of art and life.
Blurring the boundaries between art, architecture, and social commentary, the Pavilion of Finland brings together three artists for whom art, life,
and activism are intertwined. Embraced as a collective project, The pleasures
we choose evolved through the exchange of shared and individual experiences
to create areas of diverse ‘occupancies’ where visitors are encouraged to reassess and (re)consider societal expectations.
Lindman, Saumya and Wallinheimo-Heimonen’s practices are acutely
informed by their embodied experiences of structural, environmental and
social imbalances. Articulated through a wide range of materials and processes – including drawing, needlework, sculpture and healing – their works
celebrate the pleasure of the personal as a powerful means of reimagining
the world as we know it.
Following mercury poisoning, artist and healer Pia Lindman experiences
heightened sensitivity of the nervous system and awareness of the micro-signals within her body. She translates these subsensorial signals into visual
images, melodies, words, and colours and incorporates them into artworks
that explore the nuances of different environments and social situations.
In the exhibition, Lindman’s work Collectivities Cycle takes the form of an
air-conditioning clay sculpture that exposes visitors to the sculpture’s organic
matter and the microbes it supports. Accompanying “living digital paintings”—emerging from her ongoing participation in an online Tong Ren healing community—radiate with images that slowly glitch and shift into different bodily forms and energies.
Often engaging with the intricate relationship between human presence
and the environment, Vidha Saumya’s works challenge the norms of aesthetics, gender, academia and nation-state. In the pavilion, Saumya’s work
To all the barricades… the rumour got you is presented as a bricolage of three
distinct bodies of work across drawing, sculpture and cross-stitch. For example, her multi-panel ballpoint pen drawing on silk cloth depicts an assembly of individuals waiting in line. Saumya explores the queue, an embodiment of time spent waiting, as an offspring of bureaucracy and trickle-down
economy, and thus a universally recognised social architecture. Meanwhile,
a series of sculptures mimics the insignificant debris lining the city sidewalks. Occupying the liminal space between utility and obsolescence, this
‘immortal trash’ changes form but does not perish. Lastly, a constellation
of cross-stitched textiles replicate stains, patches of moisture, mold, pollutants, or toxins, questioning who and what is rendered a contaminant in our
natural and social climates.
How Great is Your Darkness by Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo- Heimonen, a
multi-dimensional artwork containing a textile installation, moving wheelchair sculpture and short videos, points to the hate speech people with disabilities are subjected to—particularly from within the medical and social
care industries. Across her practice as an artist and activist, Wallinheimo-Heimonen advocates for a shift from the medical model of disability, in
which those with disabilities are typically “treated” to fit society, towards
a social model, in which it is the ableist cultural attitudes that need to be
transformed. The fantastical scenes she creates re-story people with disabilities as their own agents of transformation. Under the guise of humour,
parties, pearls, and exquisite stitch work, her piece is thickly laced with references to the hate speech, guilt and stereotyping that people with disabilities are forced to endure in their everyday lives.
The artists’ works are connected conceptually and materially through
architectural interventions designed by Kaisa Sööt in collaboration with
the working group. Reimagining the pavilion and the kind of art, bodies
and experiences it can support, the exhibition’s “access architecture” considers access and bodily needs across registers whilst encouraging new
sensory experiences. These support structures materialise inside and outside of the pavilion – designed by Alvar Aalto in 1956 –, from a handrail
extending from the Giardini’s grounds to the access tools, spatial guides
and places to rest and connect inside the pavilion. Acting as a guiding element, the thoughtful exhibition design considers different rhythms and
durations of engagement..
The pleasures we choose refuses the exceptionalism of art and the myth that
the artist is separate from the world, emphasising on the contrary that it is
precisely the experiences which draw attention to co precisely the experiences which draw attention to co-existence existence – getting in getting in
line, taking to the streets, receiving medical care, breathing the same toxic
air – that drive us towards drawing new collective futurities into existence.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication edited by Yvonne Billimore
and Jussi Koitela, published by K. Verlag and Frame Contemporary Art
Finland, and designed by Samuli Saarinen. Intended as a handbook, it
extends the core practices, processes, and politics of the project beyond the
pavilion’s walls through various contributions.
ARTISTS
PIA LINDMAN explores the world of the subsensorial. After being poisoned
by Mercury, her nervous system became sensitized to micro-signals from within
her body. These signals she transforms into images, melodies, words, and colors,
allowing her to tune into atmospheres, toxicities and materiality in different spatial
and social conditions. She has exhibited at the 32nd São Paulo Biennial, MoMA,
MoMA PS1 and HKW in Berlin and was a fellow at Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT (2004–2007).
VIDHA SAUMYA's practice weaves together notions of exile and utopia, questioning the normatives of aesthetics and socio-political ecologies. Through acrid humour,
haptic textures, and arduous workwomanship, her poems, drawings, photographs,
videos, books, embroidery, sculptures, culinary interventions, and digital artefacts
are at once accessible and intensely challenging. She is co-founder and co-editor of
NO NIIN Magazine and a founding member of Museum of Impossible Forms.
JENNI-JUULIA WALLINHEIMO-HEIMONEN is a multidisciplinary artist and
disability activist whose work spans sculpture, video, performance and activism
within disability politics and policy. Her works deal with structural violence and
discrimination framed as kindness, and issues related to women with disabilities.
Wallinheimo-Heimonen has facilitated social art workshops and participated in
exhibitions in Finland and abroad. She received the Finnish State Prize for Multi -
disciplinary Art in 2019.
CURATORS
YVONNE BILLIMORE’s interdisciplinary practice facilitates situations for collective learning, exchange and experiences with particular attention to the intersections of feminist and ecological practices. She is the artistic director of Bioart
Society.
JUSSI KOITELA is Head of Programme at Frame and an independent curator.
His curatorial work intertwines art, embodied research methods, urban spatial
contexts, collaboration, hospitality and materiality in various forms of exhibitions
and knowledge production.
Together they co-curated Rehearsing Hospitalities, Frame’s public programme from
2019 to 2023.
Useful information for the visit
Hours:
Gardens from 10.00 to 19.00. Arsenale from 10.00 to 19.00 (from 10.00 to 20.00 on Friday and Saturday until September 30th). Closed on Mondays (except April 22, June 17, July 22, September 2, September 30, October 31, November 18).
Tickets: please visit the official website.
Phone: +39.041.5218711; fax +39.041.2728329
E-mail: [email protected]
Web: Biennale
of Venice |
