Fascinations

The architecture of idyllic landscapes, strange rooms and idealized, even abstracted living spaces combines familiar details with unfamiliar corners and explorations of buildings and the liminal areas in between. Through movements back and forth across these zones, it illuminates memories and possible answers to the question of what home is.

An artistically sophisticated performative rendition of speeches given at a conference of cultural workers in the former Yugoslavia in 1985 by artists, curators and cultural diplomats from the European South and the Middle and Far East, proposing strategies of self-determination and an emphasis on the autonomy of non-Western arts. The translation of these messages into acoustic, choreographic and architectural structures also reinforces the female voice that is missing from traditional narratives of the construction of the world today.

Private film footage of fighter pilots’ military training is permeated by the alluring details of fluttering butterfly wings. The graceful flight is marred by the awareness of navigational tasks as preparation for target acquisition and the military engagement of machines.

A lyrical reflection on the commodification of affection takes place among the spectacular forms of carbon. The sounds, broken down into acoustic and synthetic sections and composed into an urgent poem, are accompanied by images taken from documentary and fictional forms and folded into visual reflections on light, its refraction and decay. Sound details coalesce into a spatial formation, and randomness gives way to a solid structure.

Recording the thoughts and feelings of a person after an accident who has suffered a brain haemorrhage and concussion speaks to the processing of trauma, feelings of confusion and personal transformation through the gradual recognition of vulnerability.

This hybrid personal essay ventures into the depths of the country which the filmmaker's grandparents left 80 years ago in one of the colonialist-driven waves of migration. Searching for memories and associations, he wanders through the abandoned city, trying to connect with the imagery and thought of his ancestors and looking inside his own perception, reflecting on the traces of inspiration and the spirit of the places he explores.

An ascetic image, silhouetted by moving figures, charts the choreography of movements in Divisoria, Manila's busiest economic centre. Through the process of video mapping, the artist has processed the trace of his passage through the frenetic neighbourhood, erasing the background to emphasize the choreography of the teeming people and the undulations of their trajectories in the everyday hustle and bustle.

Cosmic horror explores the elements and matter of so-called inanimate nature, which become actors and form a new ecosystem. A stream of depictions of fluid materials embedded into each other is accompanied by an unsettling soundtrack that reinforces the uncertainty of whether we are watching a cosmogonic or eschatological vision.

Through so-called eco-processing, i.e. the manual processing of film material by the action of organic materials – in this case, for example, various types of fruit or coffee and wine – the artist composes a collage evoking the blurred boundary between sleep and wakefulness, when the body surrenders to stillness and the mind moves into unexplored associations.

A disturbing dystopian essay stylistically inspired by Chris Marker's La Jetée. By recycling photographs from personal albums, advertising shots and scientific images manipulated to varying degrees by artificial intelligence tools, it tells the story of a woman in a sunless future, on an arid Earth turned into a desert, and critically and ironically examines humanity's relationship with technology.

This diary film is based on a letter left by the filmmaker to her mother to explain why she is travelling to the Philippines to find her extended family. She reflects in pictures rather than words on the country of her origin whose language, Tagalog (one of the two official languages in the Philippines), she does not speak. The artefacts of the film footage then transcribe parts of the records of the journey, just as memories mark only the fragmentary knowledge retained in the diaspora.

Critical reflection on the illegal mining of precious metals under harsh working conditions is intertwined with observations of moon exploration. Two motifs interwoven with questions about the price of progress – the planet being mined and the exhausted miners digging up depleted gold deposits in Africa – draw attention to the ethical dimension of natural resource exploitation.

A herbarium of lilac varieties opens up with historical and etymological narratives and provides insight into the consequences of colonial history, the objectification of women, and the commodification of natural goods. Miss Kim, the name of a lilac brought to America from Korea and named by an American botanist, is a pejorative archaic term with connotations of a subservient woman in a typical secretarial position. Through the cataloguing of plants and things, the author seeks to create a new, multivalued and free nomenclature.

In the typical handwriting of the Los Ingrávidos collective and through the accumulation of visually expressive elements – in this case the pupils of people’s and animals’ eyes captured on film material – a ritual artefact is created through the combination with a hypnotic drum accompaniment, leading to dance and trance. An initiatory composition referring to forms of consciousness and ancestral vision becomes a fluid liturgy.

Nuppi bealde is a yoik in which the spirits of Saivo, the two-bottomed lake, are brought forth. The Sámi musician Ánnámáret's yoik melody first carries the video piece with a soaring treble, but as the piece progresses, it sinks into the depths, accompanied by Ilkka Heinonen's jouhikko (finnish bowed lyre). The soundscapes created by Turkka Inkilä first create an image of twinkling clocks, frost and spaciousness, but later shatter and are reborn in another form, creating an image of a different kind of world. The visual material of the work is a combination of ice, water, the spreading of watercolor paint and drawing animation, where the real elements of the landscape are multiplied and repeated and the black and white landscape is colored, fragmented and transformed. The video is part of a series of video works that Viitahuhta has made in collaboration with musicians Ánnámáret, Ilkka Heinonen and Turkka Inkilä. The song heard in the video was recorded for the album Ánnámáret: Nieguid duovdagat.

A dreamlike deconstruction of the female body in its movements and wandering through space and in confrontation with visual ruptures. The lyrical composition allows surfaces and gestures to spill out into surfaces of exploration, situating them within the whole of the mastery of the void by physical presence.

Portrait moments collected across the world carry powerful situations and stand out from the grip of the image with an expression, a tear, a flame, a scar or a position of the body. The glances and gestures directed beyond the frame of the photograph both stun and shake; the documentary and fictional scenes highlight traces of the elements or of cruelty, but also impressive expressions of harmony and concord. A single window carries the weight or the unfolding of a dramatic story.

An elegy for a non-existent country explores the hypothesis that breaking ties with the past can be the path to a new identity. Through an inventive narrative and across temporal distance, it connects a Vietnamese-speaking Kosovan woman and an American soldier in Vietnam, who are surprised by a new experience with language that affects their memory and their reading of the world and relationships.

Images of Uzbek folklore permeate the author's story with the motif of trauma. She connects the reflection on self-acceptance and awareness of one's own strength with cultural self-determination and the need for personal and collective resilience. The narrative, woven from themes of traditional Uzbek culture through materials drawn from a variety of sources including archival Uzbek films and photographs, unfolds in an evocative sound design.

An exploration into feelings of disorientation and uncertainty through questions posed to fictional beings displaced from an inhospitable environment. An ingenious found-footage collage layers images from different times and sources to parody possible futures dominated by misinformation and experience of the presence of alien elements, movements, anatomies and gestures.

A spirited hybrid opera about an architect builds tension between destruction and construction. In the conflict between exaltation and materiality, it emphasizes the irreplaceability of the experience of physical contact with the external and the spillover of the view into the landscape. In opposition to her colleagues who – almost as if they were from another planet – plan everything behind the walls of their laboratories, Carla feels that even the wind can be a sculptor.

Bands of the image network wrap and overlay elements in the landscape, decomposing them into a structure of panels, cut-outs and colours. Artworks in open space are transposed into systems of image and sound elements, and wandering through the place becomes an adventure through the bends of bird's eye perspectives, light compositions and 3D scans of objects protruding from uneven surfaces.

One of the basic mechanisms enabling the projection of films, which the audience then perceives as a sequence of moving images, is the object of representation here – through its mechanical parts and the demonstration of its operation – in a collage of images reprinted in a digital stream.

A critical analysis of a scene of relaxation on the beach. The genre of photovideography uses the dislocation and decomposition of the static image to transform the idyll into a series of unsettling ruptures, shifts and movements that decompose the well-being into a grid of sunlit colours and crumbling surfaces.