| IINA KUUSIMÄKI
On The Shore Installation, photographs, video 15.9 - 3.10.2010 Through loss, the core issues of humanity become pressing. The experience of sorrow can be so intense that there are no words – only strong emotions and silence. The starting points for this exhibition are those silent and intense unsaid things. After experiencing wordless grief, I started to read plenty of poetry. Some of those poems are in the exhibition, as bubbles in water. In the installation 80 Poems in Water there are a collection of poems from antiquity to contemporary times, which I have felt significant in one way or another. The selection of the poems has been free; they represent different styles, from several periods in history, from various cultures, the subjects of the poems are diverse. Each of them has interested me in various ways; either emotionally, historically, sociologically or in general playful way. I have recorded the poems and set them in max/msp-program which analyzes the sounds. From the sound analysis the max/msp then sends out a series of numbers into an arduino microcontroller, which controls the amount of electricity (according to the numbers from the poem recordings) to the airpump, which is connected to the glass container full of water. In this way I can ‘transfer’ the poems into bubbles in water, the size of which varying according to the sound qualities in the voice. When there are pauses in the poems, there are no bubbles. The poems in the installation are flowing as bubbles in a continuous stream alongside all the other works, reminding of the richness and spaciousness of the human inner world. The works Lifecycle of a Breath I and II are still photographs of a video of my one outbreath against glass. All phenomena has it’s own lifecycle, even inanimate objects – also the experience of mourning. The series News is my way of depicting different stages of sorrow of loss in the core. Often there is a sense of coming to a halt and feelings of outsidedness related to the rest of the world - which is something that the name of the exhibition refers to. |