exhibition.

 

Elvira Akzigitova (EE/DE) is a self-taught, visual artist focusing on analogue photography and alternative printing techniques. Spending long hours in the darkroom, she tries to capture the trace of light, and its tactile essentials. Influenced by the visionary, yet contentious “Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain”, Akzigitova's work refers to a suggestive, imaginary science. With the pioneers of that period, she shares the idea that Man is more than a Machine, thus photography can be more than a mechanical process, it can be an optical creation.

Her practice respects the relation between the time spent to produce a photographic image versus taking it, considering the intricacy of the process as bringing out a deeper, more intense, understanding of the potential of photography. Electric photography, luminograms, solarisation - these "tools" guide the artist to create and control visual sensation. The fusion of the qualities of the photographic paper and the artist's intention stimulate the desire to photographically capture the forces of a metaphysical activity. The results are an unfamiliar visual experience and, at times, visual inventions: images without a real-life model with which one can compare it.

Roger Beebe (US) is a filmmaker whose work, since 2006, consists primarily of multiple projector performances that explore the world of found images and the "found" landscapes of late capitalism. He has screened his films around the globe at such unexpected venues as the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square and McMurdo Station in Antarctica, as well as more traditional ones, such as Sundance and the Museum of Modern Art. He has presented solo shows at Anthology Film Archives, The Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City and Los Angeles Filmforum, among many other venues. In addition, Beebe programmes films, running Flicker, a festival of small-gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000, in addition to being the founder and Artistic Director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film Festival, from 2004-2014. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Art at the Ohio State University, where he helped launch the new Moving-Image Production major in 2017.

Daniel Beijar (FI) works with organically developed imagery, and is a long-standing member of Filmverkstaden. Inspired by a workshop with Dagie Brundert in 2016, the works exhibited have been developed with Wineonol (a red wine developer), using the vitamin C inherent in the wine as an active developing chemical. Beijar prioritises an accessible and low-impact form of image-making and allows this to lead the aesthetic. The chemicals can easily be bought from supermarkets or foraged from nature, each changing the image in a specific way, for instance lingonberry, coffee which leaves a brown tint, and red wine which leaves a greenish tint, as seen in the works exhibited. ‘Trash film’ and ‘trash paper’ are salvaged from a dark room and a photo store, being deemed surplus or unsellable and resulting in unpredictable or potentially corroded imagery. The 50–60 year-old cameras used to produce the works have been gifted or bought cheaply second-hand.

Dagie Brundert (DE) is a filmmaker and photographer working with Super 8 and pinhole photography. having developed films and photos using eco-friendly DIY processing for many years, she holds Super 8 as a beloved medium, deeming the colours, blacks and greys of analogue film as deeper and more profound than their digital brothers and sisters.

Not wishing to imagine the world one-to-one, Brundert aims to imagine the insides, the cracked imperfectness and second-view beauty of the world through using a perfectly matching, imperfect, and sometimes out of focus, wabi-sabi-ish approach to the medium. The world is complicated, dangerous and beautiful, and people are brutal, greedy and stupid, but also confused, loving and incredibly social. Due to this, her films have a positive and optimistic tone, and she makes it her business to throw ‘small beauty bombs’ into the world. While not explicitly political, Brundert’s work is always personal, and plays in a small, manageable space, bubble or universe, believing that coincidence has creative potential and humour, and that beauty is everywhere.

"The food waste of one person + one day is enough to produce exactly 1 litre developer!”

Britt Al-Busultan (FI/NL) studied Fine Arts (BA) at AKI, Academy of Fine Arts in the Netherlands and completed an MA in Time//Space from the University of the Arts in Helsinki and from Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. She has presented her expanded cinema works internationally in exhibitions and festivals, such as at Ann Arbor Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam and AAVE Festival Helsinki.

Al-Busultan is based in the area of Vaasa, Finland where she founded the artist-run film lab, Filmverkstaden in 2010.

Drawing from early film history, when film was, above all, a tribute and celebration of the medium, Al-Busultan’s works deal with present, pressing issues, connecting the past with visions of the future. As human beings, we are all connected to the distant past and the faraway future, and every existing thing is the result of something that happened in the past. Through the choices we make and made, we incorporate this past in the future, in an ever-developing series of nows.

The works invite the viewer to engage in the now. Narratives that imagine our future reality are constructed, based on current knowledge and experience. It embraces presence in this moment, in the here and now, finding our way in troubled waters. Al-Busultan uses analogue film in installations and performances to create works of expanded cinema, in which continuously shifting, site-specific, immersive environments are built up. The temporal experience of film is contrasted with film as a spatial structure. The films live in the moment of their projection. What remains are interpretations, reviews and recollections, personal, unreliable and incomplete.

Claudia Hausfeld, (IS/DE) is an artist and photographer based in Iceland. Having studied photography at the Zürich University of the Arts, and completed her BA in Fine Arts from the Iceland Art Academy in 2012, she has exhibited her works widely, including at the Fotoforum Pasquart in Biel, Switzerland, Hafnarborg Art Museum, the National Gallery of Iceland (Listasafn Reykjavík), and the National Museum of Iceland (Þjóðminjasafn). Her work is featured in private collections in Iceland and abroad, and in the Hoffmann-Roche collection in Switzerland. Hausfeld has been an active member of several artist-run initiatives in Iceland, Denmark and Switzerland and recently completed a three-year membership of the Living Art Museum in Reykjavík. Additional to her artist practice, Hausfeld shares the management of the photography workshop at the Iceland Art Academy.

Janika Herlevi (FI) is a visual artist who received a Bachelor of Arts from the NOVIA School for Applied Sciences, and later studied printmaking at Lahti School for Applied Sciences. Based in Vaasa, her work is primarily formed through interactions and intersections between drawing, painting and printmaking.

Established by the visual artists Aga Jarząb and Maciek Bączyk, kinoMANUAL (PL) is a small, independent, audio-visual production house from Wrocław (Poland), focused on experimenting with moving image and sound. kinoMANUAL primarily explores analogue animation techniques like hand-drawing, cut-out or direct cinema. Enjoying the tactile contact with film and the production process itself, they create films and objects that correspond with a rich tradition of moving image, kinetic art and experimental cinema.

kinoMANUAL cooperates with international art institutions, artists and researchers worldwide as both motion designers, and art fair organisers. Since 2015, they have been collaborating continuously with Punto y Raya Festival, Spain, Filmverkstaden, Finland (as an active member) and O!Pla Polish Film Festival, Poland.

kinoMANUAL runs animation workshops for adults and children during animation and film festivals, art fairs and culture showcases

Natalia Koziel (FI/PL) is a visual artist based in Finland, with a practice originating in the worlds of painting and printmaking. Often changing in artistic scale, Koziel works with large paintings, stamp-sized graphics, space projections and live cinema performance. Located at the intersection of print art, theatre and film, her projects utilise slides, film projectors and overhead projectors, making use of them as optical tools, through their powerful beams of light. Believing that failed processes, damaged materials and other flaws often contain hidden beauty, Koziel is particularly fascinated by analogue recording and playback media, the poetry of cracked vinyl and scratched or overexposed film. Currently working with philosophies of colour, she collects samples of colours–and the countless emotions they contain–in the form of photographs and newspaper clippings. these act as a source for shade combination and endless inspiration.

"My studio has an extensive collection of colours in a chest drawer that reads 'flavours'...”

Matti Lahti (FI) is a photographer and engineer, based in Finland. Using his experiences working onboard the cargo vessel MV Norstream, he has collected a series of analogue seascape photography over the last 3 years. The images present the English Channel and the coastal areas around England and Belgium. With two cameras on board, Lahti always begins with the intention of documenting life on board, through the crew, their work and everything else they do. However, humans are rarely found within his images and, instead, life is presented through the ship and its surrounding environment.

Rebecca Erin Moran (IS/US) is a visual artist based between Reykjavik and Berlin. She graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000 and has been shown around the world such as Gallery Surge in Tokyo, The Reykjavik Art Museum Iceland, Nýló, Kling og Bang, Sequences Time Arts Festival, and Kunstverein Munich Germany. In 2009 she founded Kinosmiðja, an analogue film co-op hosting monthly screenings at the Reykjavik Art Museum and teaching workshops.

Her practice vocalises a soft revolution, one that resists a fixed positioning and definition. It is an embrace of all nuances of in- between states and notions of impermanence and repetition: often using structures and materials that adapt over time or evolve within the piece. Rebecca's work is an ode to open-ended phases of uncertainty. A deep reach into spaces that are somehow undefined or even against a singular monumental outcome.

Marek Pluciennik (FI/PL) is a Polish/Canadian filmmaker and cinema artist based in Helsinki. His work focuses on the material and ephemeral nature of the film medium. In his latest works, he interfaces traditional projectors with digital microcontrollers as he explores visual motion perception in the frame-based medium. The works are a meditative study at the extreme boundaries of apparent movement. Pluciennik refers to it as a liminal flicker, where the viewers' motion perception is tested by a "meltdown" of classic motion perception; a similar phenomenon to liminal space, where an empty space can feel unsettling and familiar at the same time.

Aside from films, his work is site specific, focusing on expanded cinema projection performances and installations. Since 2017, Pluciennik has organized expanded cinema events under the title Causatum Live Cinema Series and between 2014 and 2016 he curated the films of Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal for the Helsinki based AAVE festival. His films have been screened, among others, at Madatac07 Festival in Madrid, the Images Film Festival in Toronto and the International Short Film Festival in Tampere. His performances have been shown in contemporary art galleries and festivals including Process in Riga, Latvia, Fylkingen in Stockholm, Sweden, AAVE Festival, and Sola Festival in Helsinki, Finland.

Greg Pope (NO/UK) is an artist and filmmaker based in Oslo, Norway. After dabbling in punk rock bands and absurdist performance, he founded film collective ‘Situation Cinema’ (Brighton 1986) and ‘Loophole Cinema’ (London, 1989). Working collaboratively and individually, Pope has made video installations, live art and single-screen film works since 1996. These works include live cinema performance pieces ‘Light Trap’ and ‘Cipher Screen’, as well as 35mm film productions and slide projection performances. His many collaborations include working with sound artists Lee Paterson, John Hegre, Lasse Marhaug and Okkyung Lee, and bands including Sult and Ich Bin N!ntendo. Pope has performed at festivals and events in Europe, North and South America, and Australia.

Lasse Vairio (FI) is an artist and filmmaker, whose process often begins with observations in a landscape, and progresses to shooting film and developing, all while still in the field. By utilising eco-friendly chemicals, Vairio achieves interesting results which are less toxic, making it possible to bring the photo-chemical process into a site-specific context where local ingredients and materials can be used. This ‘'hands on’ approach enriches his artistic work, and harmonizes the relationship between the artist, the environment, and the materials used. While not necessarily offering solutions, Vairio is often thinking about coexistence in a rapidly changing world and testing alternative ways of making and working within this context.

"Jag filmar, framkallar och samlar intryck från det dagliga livet. Förkastar paradiset. Hittar istället modellen för parasiten. (I film, evoke and collect impressions from daily life. Rejecting paradise, instead finding the model for the parasite.) "

Accessibility

The exhibition spaces of Vaasa City Art Gallery are accessible but there are a couple of steps on the way to the customer service desk and the museum’s product selection. Accessible toilet facilities are located in the nearby Gallery Ibis.

An entrance without any steps is located by the doorway to Gallery Ibis, on the side of the building facing Vaasanpuistikko Street. The door is locked but you can ask the personnel to open it or phone the information desk at Vaasa City Art Gallery (tel. +358 40 182 3839). If necessary, the personnel will assist you in opening the door and using the ramp.

It is possible to drop off car passengers in the immediate vicinity of the art gallery entrance. Customers are allowed to park at the roadside.

The forecourt driveways are cobbled and slippery in damp weather. A bus stop for local traffic is nearby.