Complaints Choirs -solo exhibition is taking over the beautiful space of Kunstverein Ludwigshafen as a 5 channel installation. The installation is extended with the Georgian complaints choir! An artist talk and conversation will take place at the Kunstverein 30 June 12 o’clock – and four local complaints choir perform in that event. Thank you curator Barbara Auer for this wonderful collaboration!
9 CARTUCHOS
– Paper Bag Stories From Cuba
The paper bag is a deceptively simple object, often overlooked, seldom admired. It nevertheless can tell manifold stories spanning from early industrialization, to late modernist consumer society up to the most recent global trade wars. Especially in the Cuban context, with its own economic model, the blockade of the US and the collapse of the Eastern bloc the simple paper bag can be a great interrogator of histories, politics, economics and, conflicts of a global scale. In Cuba paper bags mean both past and the future: paper bags were changed into plastic bags when the Soviet Union collapsed, so for many people they are nostalgic objects.
We commissioned local professional writers and thinkers to write a speech about Cuba from their particular point of view – using a paper bag as a reference point. An edition of 7 paper bags with excerpts of each of the 7 speeches printed on the bags in total 100.000 bags. The bags are distributed over the period of the biennial to vegetable markets and small grocery stores around Havana to be given out to people. Thus the artwork is slowly distributed to many households of the city over the period of the biennial. The speeches at whole can be listened at the Havana biennale exhibition
101 kaikkien puolesta on julkaistu myös verkossa! https://satayksi.fi
101 For all is now online. It is first only in Finnish, but later on we will add English subtitles.
Imagine a Finland of 100 inhabitants: 51 of them would be women, 13 would be over 70 years old, one would be from Asia and one would hold a Ph.D. 101 For All put it’s focus at the people hidden inside statistics – and to the stories behind their opinions.
In 2015 we visited one hundred homes around Finland and interviewed people about their personal relationship with 30 topics that tend to divide opinions. The 100 interviewees formed a cross-section of the Finnish population in terms of gender, age, region, education, level of income, country of origin and mother tongue.
Why do we think like we think? The interviewees tried to pinpoint experiences and influences that play a role on how their opinions were shaped. Their 1900 responses fed into an interactive video-installation first shown in Helsinki Art Hall in 2015.
The Finnish Cultural Foundation supported the exhibition in Helsinki Art Hall and the publishing of the work online in 2019. Even 92 of 100 participants allowed their interviews to be used also in the online version of the art piece. The photo is from the installation in Helsinki Art Hall.