Aulis Harmaala’s Now I am 47 exhibition consists of photographs, a recorded monologue, an ‘Indian’ performance, and a milk-churn-stand installation. Everything is a reconstruction: in his works Harmaala returns to his childhood as a middle-aged man. Now I am 47 will be shown at the Cable Gallery May 30–June 20, 2013.

Aulis Harmaala was born into a farming family in Northern Finland in 1966. As a child, he played at being a Native-American ‘Indian’ in secret, on his own, and dreamed of being a rock star, but in harsh everyday reality he was a scythe-swinging labourer. Harmaala was more interested in his own fantasy world, running around the forest as an Indian or daydreaming about being a rock musician. When these games were exposed, he felt ashamed.

What kind of man should I be? Had I, as a child, already locked myself into playing alone and staying that way? In the prison of external expectations that grew inside me the secret Indian warrior battled with my own sense of insignificance. The social expectations of my environment meant that the Indian warrior had to back down. But he was not forgotten.

In my photographs I as an adult play the part of an Indian, a rock star and a labourer. On the recordings it is both the child and the adult me speaking. In the Indian performance my fantasies and shame about these secret games are lived out in front of everyone present. My childhood home is symbolized by a milk-churn stand. This is a shelter made out of planks, where dairy farms brought their milk churns for transportation to the dairy. These stands disappeared along with the small farms in the 1980s. The milk-churn stand was also a meeting place and a link with the outside world: with the village, the town, with getting away from home. In returning to the milk-churn stand I am writing my own story and exhibiting my own place.

Aulis Harmaala graduated with a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts from the Department of Art of the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at Aalto University in 2011. He has also studied at Kankaanpää and Lahti art schools. Harmaala creates installations and site-specific performances. His themes occupy the borders between public and private, and emerge from personal experience to become public discussions. Dialogue and social interaction are also a part of his works. Harmaala lives in Helsinki.

Opening Wednesday May 29 at 17–19. Welcome!

Aulis Harmaala will perform Indian Warrior at the opening at 17:30 on Wednesday, May 29. The performance will be staged again on Thursday June 6 at 11:30. The Indian performance lasts about an hour.

Three videos by three artists who use methods of performance. All the videos are short. They all balance between a sense of thrill, melancholia, and humour. The videos and the screening are realised on the artists’ initiative, outside the conventional institutional procedures.

Carlos Llavata: Penitent Bridge, 2001

“It is that rare and magical moment when a serious researcher (who has been practising performance as a prayer) finds the perfect match between his own language and the inner resonance of it.”

Loïc Connanski: Bande-Annonce, 1994

“The French word “Bande-Annonce” means trailer.
In a Parisian market, an unknown video artist shouts to the consumers to let them know that he doesn’t sell bananas or oranges but videos. Nobody cares…”

Tomasz Szrama: Give me the Light, 2012

A couple addicted to cigarettes, performed by Tomasz Szrama and Liina Kuittinen.

Carlos Llavata (b. 1964)
Independent visual and performance artist. 1983 he started an art education at the Ceramics School of Manises. Then he moved to San Francisco and attended SFAI for about a year, never officially enrolled. Later on he returned to Spain, finished his studies at the Fine Arts University in Valencia, and in 2001 he graduated The Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. He has organised around 90 official collective events (mostly performance events) and presented his work in six solo shows.

Loïc Connanski (b. 1958)
Video artist since over 17 years, Loïc Connanski is quite unclassified as a contemporary artist. He is also rather disturbing. His method of working is one of derision. Connanski’s technique of auto-filming is close to that of Nelson Sullivan, the New York based video artist. He is the anti-thesis of the political correct in that he always says what he thinks, quite directly. Connanski is also what he says himself an “ego hunter”, hunting the egos of the art world, and asking them the simple questions around their work. He is an intellectual who works with the negation of the intellectual discourse. He started recently to realize performances, although one also can see his video work as performances in front of a camera and then broadcasted on French national television. He has a corrosive humour where the pre-dominating quality is his love for language. His preferred target is television, around which he proceeds with a complete demontage of appearances and the “labyrinth of illusions”.

Tomasz Szrama (b. 1970)
Tomasz Szrama graduated in 1998 from Fine Art Academy in Wroclaw, Poland. He lives in Helsinki, Finland. Since 1996 Tomasz makes happenings, performances and art videos. As of 2005 he has been co-organizer of performance art events in Helsinki called Art Contact, (from 2009 New Art Contact) and documenting experimental art festivals and live art events. In 2011 he was the co-organizer of Fake Finn Festival of Experimental Art and the following Fake Finns and Others events. Szrama is presently working at HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme.

At first glance, Rita Jokiranta’s video installation Between Strength and Weakness evokes a nostalgic longing for past times when we felt happy. But it also asks: What lasts? What is strong? What is fragile? And finally: What do we really see – or want to see? Jokiranta’s new work will be shown at the Cable Gallery on 7–28.3.2013.

The installation also deals with the shifting, distortion and fragmenting of reality, and with memory’s attempts to hold on to the good things and to forget the bad. At the same time, the work carries on the themes of seeing and looking that Jokiranta has also explored previously. Forming a visual impression of what is seen is an individual process, and we can never interpret what we see in the same way as others do. Even though some things in the world look permanent and stable, they, too, have their weak points. Images blur and fade like memories, until they totally disintegrate.

The installation consists of video projections, lights, colour-effect filters and mirror foil. Another central element is the nine steps from an old, cast-iron spiral staircase, its ornamental shapes repeated in its shadows and mixed into the video images.

Rita Jokiranta mostly makes video and photographic works, along with installations. Her video works are often about the dynamics of image, event and interpretation. The viewer’s own interpretation has always been integral to her art. Jokiranta currently lives and works in Mariehamn on the Åland Islands and in Stockholm. Since 1989, she has had several solo exhibitions and participated in invited exhibitions in Finland and various parts of Europe. In 2011, she carried out two large projects, a three-channel video installation Here, and Beyond for the Åland Islands Art Museum’s ARS 11 satellite exhibition, and a four-channel video installation Every Image Is a Beginning for Forum Box in Helsinki. Last year, she took part in Photographic Centre Nykyaika’s 30th-anniversary exhibition in Tampere and made a site- specific videowork that was projected onto the cityscape in Norrtälje in Sweden.

Thanks to: Åland Maritime Museum, Markus Kåhre, Peter Svedberg, Mi Duncker, Pro AV Saarikko Oy, Tiina Barck, Kari Soinio, Timo Kirves, Egidija Medeksaite

The project was supported by AVEK – the promotion centre for audiovisual culture

Anna Estarriola’s (b. 1980) exhibition The Living in Three Acts introduces five characters, who each perform their own mini solo. One with multiple troubles, one perplexed by his own image, and one permanently illuminated. One with glittering aspirations, and one with the power to spin endlessly.

Then, in the three simultaneous acts of a mini performance set on three stage-like tables, the five characters all appear, interact and finally fade away.

Anna Estarriola holds Master of Fine Arts degrees from both the University of Barcelona (2004) and the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (2009). She has also studied contemporary dance. She is interested in intuitively envisaged exchanges and interactions between the visual and media arts and other art forms, especially dance.

The themes of her work often revolve around perception of reality, emotions, individual and communal behaviour, and communication. She is fascinated and disturbed by human beings, and mesmerized and puzzled by moving images, moving bodies and moving objects. She has lived and worked in Helsinki since 2004. Her works, both installations and stage performances, have been shown in Finland and abroad.

The exhibition has been kindly supported by the Alfred Kordelin Foundation, Finnish Art Society, and The Promotion Center for Audiovisual Culture AVEK.

Artist: Anna Estarriola
Mechanics: Arttu Polojarvi
Electronics: Gregoire Rousseau
Video performers: Anna Estarriola, Otto Korkalo, Harri Kuorelahti, Jukka Tarvainen, Inari Virmakoski

Cecilia Stenbom’s (b. 1976) solo exhibition Nobody gets out of here alive explores the idea of the impossible quest for a more ordered and less anxious existence, and the perceived dangers inherent in modern life. In the works in the Cable Gallery Stenbom investigates the methods that people use to control their anxiety at a time when fear and chaos are constantly projected into their everyday environment. The exhibition will be on view from February 7 to March 2, 2013.

Working across media including film and video, installation, drawing and painting, Stenbom examines our anxieties and desires by appropriating and reinterpreting real and fictional scenarios in entertainment, the mass media, retail and domestic life.

A central feature of the Cable Gallery exhibition is How To Choose, a short film about small and seemingly insignificant everyday choices. Guided by a female narrator, the story is written as instructions rather than as personal reflection. Fraught with anxiety about illness, death and other negative outcomes, her decisions are made partly logically and partly following a set of entirely personal rules.

Once we get there it is all over is a series of monochrome drawings on paper of a wide variety of subjects, ranging from shop interiors to lotto numbers and resuscitation drugs. These new works explore the inevitable emptiness of consumer desire.

The paintings in the exhibition are based on images digitally photographed from a television screen showing scenes from a California-based reality-TV show. Taking the characters out of their context allows Stenbom to construct paintings that oscillate between narrative and abstraction.

The Scene, a silent video animation, evokes the effect of diffused coloured light from an emergency-vehicle warning light spilling through a window and moving across a room. This familiar sight, which is as likely to occur in your home as on your TV screen, prompts a poignant moment of reflection that, as with Stenbom’s other works, treads a fine line between fiction and reality.

Cecilia Stenbom is originally from Stockholm, Sweden. She completed her BA in Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2003 and an MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 2005. She lives and works in the North East of England. She is currently working on a commission for the Berwick Film and Media Festival in September 2013. She is a member of AV-arkki (Finland) and her work is represented by Workplace Gallery (UK).

Decorations for the western world’s Christmas are made in a small, ancient village in China. Chen Hangfeng is one of the artists in Rauma Art Museum’s Time of the Dragon exhibition, and his solo exhibition at the Cable Gallery shows views and the everyday lives of people in the places where our glittering Christmas decorations come from. In the village along Mei creek they get ready for Christmas throughout the year. The work is done by hand, a combined effort by the entire extended family.

Chen’s works reflect the traditions and special features of Chinese culture, the role of the individual in the community, the attitude to work, and the everyday lives and feelings of ordinary people. But they also specifically reveal the radical impact of globalization and western influences on China. The wind from the West is blowing strongly and the old systems are changing.

Chen’s video installation Scattered Sceneries along Mei creek (2012) will be premiered at the Cable Gallery.

“According to the old family book, the village has a history dating back more than 1000 years, traceable to the Song Dynasty. Numerous important scholars and literati originally came from the village, and the poems they wrote were recorded in the family book. One set of poems describes ten bits of scenery from around the village, all situated along Mei creek. They include Stone horse carrying the mist and Snow covering the bamboo forest next to Mei creek… Time has passed, Mei creek is still flowing, but the scenery has long gone, and has been transformed into scenes of white foam, red balls, green tinsel, and many of the ornaments we see today. In fact, this village now produces more than 50% of China’s Christmas exports. All of them are handmade, some designed and invented by the villagers themselves, even though most of the tools they use to make these Christmas decorations are farming-related implements. Magically, they managed to mix and match these agricultural tools perfectly to suit their production!” Chen Hangfeng.

Chen Hangfeng (b. 1974) lives and works in Shanghai.

Also on display in the exhibition are two earlier video works, You Can Get Them and The Last Supper, made during residencies in Luxembourg and London. The main unifying theme of the exhibition is the effects of economic growth and consumerism. Chen Hangfeng is on a residency at HIAP until 15.1.2013.

Chen Hangfeng’s solo show is part of Rauma Art Museum’s Time of the Dragon exhibition of Chinese contemporary art. All of the shows are the result of a curator’s residency in Shanghai awarded by HIAP to Rauma Art Museum’s curator Henna Paunu in 2011. Time of the Dragon will be at Rauma Art Museum until 31.3.2013.

Henna Paunu

Curator