In collaboration with Jan Wolski
Over the course of the next few posts, we’ll share artist interviews and insights about this year’s ON SIGHT visual arts line-up. You can experience all of TBA:09’s visual arts installations from Sept 4 – 13, every day 12 – 6:30 pm. And join us for a free opening night party September 3, from 8 – 10:30 pm at Washington High School (map).
The Walls Of My Hall is a multichannel video installation referring to the human body as a place to exist–a structure–related to its built environment. The work happens in “selected reality” as bodies are at rest and in calculated motion. The surroundings they inhabit and the furniture they sit upon are radically removed. Stark black, empty spaces still reflect what was once there and what has been erased. An audio soundtrack of live radio broadcast is pumped into the spaces by small radios, an echo of the present world colliding with these suspended people. Although dark and eerie, the piece also reflects a certain sense of humor, a moment of hope that we carry on even when we are represented in real or fictionalized space that is void of support.
Figure V: An installation view of Ketola’s The Walls Of My Hall.
KK: How are buildings related to bodies?
JK: The bodies are carried against the gravity by imaginary (and in this case invisible) buildings, spaces, furniture and other man-made structures. The structures can be imagined by the viewer by observing the compositions of the bodies and their relations to each other.
KK: How is your work reflecting a sense of time? Does audio from the radios which are broadcast in real-time locate us in the here and now or is the ambient soundscape meant to dislocate us from our current moment?
JK: In a way, the work is not bound to any specific moment of the day and in this way also not to time. This has been left open. But because of the “space” character of the work, the radios, on the contrary, are supposed to remind us of the current moment and of the fact that the figures in the work are actually doing everyday-like things.
KK: What was the process of making this work? Is it like a reductive drawing? Was there ever a building to erase? Or is it all illusion?
JK: There were lots of very rough sketches for each image! For the apartment building image there was a sketch which existed only on a graphic computer program, but never in the program that was used to make the final image. Only calculations or intuition were used to find the right location for each character. The characters were originally recorded on HD-video, taking into account the right perspective and distance to match the final location in the final image. Each one is a live recording of a being and is not manipulated. In a way the images are like digital collages of a bunch of time-based images and are actually more a character of adding than reducing. It is all illusion and imagination combined with the personal life of the author.
KK: Define “sweet hopelessness,” a term you use to describe the emotional impetus of your work…
JK: I often have to explain why I use the word sweet when describing hopelessness. I still haven’t found the exact answer for that nor have I dropped the word out; it belongs there.
I get touched by people and by a sort of absurd hopelessness, that is connected to the condition of being human. The confusion that inevitably happens when being a human in the unintelligible world and having to deal with the impossibility of certainty is touching, a bit funny and a bit sad and therefore beautiful. I’m interested in this beauty, that can be also described as “sweet hopelessness of being a human being.” In other words, it is some sort of tragi-comical experience of the world. The word sweet stands for touching and is even funny after all, it really is, so that this hopelessness makes me laugh; I feel sorry but also laugh at myself and at all the poor people in the world, in a way it’s a relief; to get out of some angst and to be able to laugh, bit black, but not at all mean laugh. I find the work that is shown in TBA humoristic too, despite the spacial and even serious character of it. Hopelessness stands for a basic condition of a human. I try not to be violent, I am looking for some sort of peaceful and a bit humoristic position against this basic feeling that I am preoccupied daily with. Humor and hope are important for me, I don’t want my work to have a hopeless atmosphere.
KK: In the festival we present work by both visual and performance artists, and some artists like yourself cross these boundaries. Do you think of these genres as being two different worlds? Is it important to have a distinction or should we just invent a new term for how artists interpret the world?
JK: There are always certain qualities, not the most important ones, in works that can be understood better by understanding a bit about the media. But the best works don’t make the viewer preoccupied with these qualities. These kinds of works are only so rare! Although I think distinctions can be almost a waste of energy, they sometimes help one to talk about certain details of a work, if necessary. Those kinds of works exist that are very occupied by the qualities of a certain media and the content is almost only about the media. That kind of art couldn’t exist without distinctions(personally I don’t find that kind of art interesting). In my own work I don’t think about genres too much and work with what ever seems to suit the best. On the other hand I end up using mostly video and find my work belonging to the visual art genre. At the moment when I am thinking of making a “living image” work, I catch myself thinking: I am drawn more to performance art…
I would really like to hear the term for how the artists interpret the world! I am sure it would not be able to cover everything…How would it come to life? By democratic voting?!
About
Working in video and photography, Finnish artist Johanna Ketola reconstructs narrative that is built upon her quotidian observations of life. This results in both fictional and autobiographical characters and stories, which often reflect her state of being as affected by a kind of sweet and absurd hopelessness about the human condition. Her work has been exhibited at Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland; in Holden Gallery in Manchester, UK; in Espace Croix-Baragnon in Toulouse, France; in Amos Anderson Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland; in the following Finnish museums: Jyväskylä, Rauma, Oulu, and Mikkeli; and in Gallery Jangva in Helsinki, Finland, among others.
www.johannaketola.com
