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20210916

We wrote an investigative article Our efforts to show solidarity for Palestine are tested at Kiasma, with Pietari Kylmälä for No Niin. The text was edited by Elham Rahmati & Vidha Saumya, who did a great job. With help from the kind people of the Boycott Zabludowicz campaign we were able to gain an update to the affairs of Chaim “Poju” Zabludowicz, a business person who funds an influential pro-Israeli lobbying organisation (BICOM), and who has a long record of investments in companies which work for the security and military forces of the State of Israel.

As a senior member of the Kiasma Support Foundation, Zabludowicz is deeply involved with the museum. In our view, their track record as an investor makes their affiliation with the public institution problematic. Kiasma should ensure that museum beneficiaries are not involved in businesses which benefit from military conflicts such as the current apartheid policies implemented by the State of Israel. We asked museum director Leevi Haapala for a response to the troubling details our investigation touched. Their response is available online.

Haapala’s response depicts a disconnection between politics and rhetorics. It’s disheartening to read how they deploy the museum’s newly announced safer space policy as a rhetorical device to slither away from responding to the concerns we’ve brought forth. They even spent a paragraph celebrating an artist whose artwork Zabludowicz’s involvement has secured into their collection.

In Haapala’s portrayal, as the director of the museum they’re also leading the operations of the support foundation. Paradoxically, while asserting that they are in control, Haapala also insists that since the museum is funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture, the organisation cannot take a public stand in humanitarian concerns. This means that in their leadership the programming of the museums is meant to represent political struggles but not to engage with political reality.

The response depicts Kiasma open and willing to receive funds from anyone. It seems there are no standards, no qualifications – as long as you bring in money and love art, the museum’s happy to serve you. This stance is common for private museums. But Kiasma is not a private museum. It is funded by the state; we need it to do better.

The museum expects its visitors to follow their safer space policy but does not expect the same from their financial beneficiaries.

Kiasma is not a “safe space” if it continues to harbour businesspeople who are investing in companies which Amnesty International is investigating for human right violations. I will not participate in events in the museum until they set forth guidelines which ensure that their beneficiaries are not involved in business actions which violate international law and human rights.

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20210913

“Feed me, so that I may feed the horses”. My Kone Foundation application in a nutshell. The text is in Finnish and available trough this link. I think this is the last time I’ll apply funding for the Trans-Horse initiative in a research framework. This marks the fifth year I’m approaching art and research funders in Finland with the same core idea. The idea is simple: To ask a horse what we should do next. If this application returns as a dud, I have to move on before the zombie-proposal consumes me. I will also have to seriously reconsider if I can continue in the PhD program at Aalto. The university has been generous by offering a few teaching gigs and I’ve also inspected two master’s thesis but there isn’t enough paid academic work to sustain active participation and involvement with the faculty. I don’t have the means to commit. The odd-jobs and gigs I manage to secure require dedication which make reading and writing difficult. If the Kone and Finnish Cultural Foundation applications fail, I’ll try to source money for a small independent publication which will summarize the work I’ve done teaching art with-and-in relation to horses.  I don’t believe not having a degree is a hindrance for the work I do and I don’t think it has a severe impact on my opportunities to be employed by universities because my asset lie in engagement rather then research.

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20210908

Fluxus scores are performance as aphorism. #ॐ Artist-researchers like them because: Its text (a quote can fill a paper), they are short, its techniques are canonized by popular artists (no need for introductions), it requires specialization to interpret (but is revealed simple, even un-intelligent in close reading), scores are forgiving (gaps in the text get filled with performance know-how and gaps in the know-how get filled with text). They work on all fronts of artist-researcher life: On paper, seminars and as art. Scores are optimized products of presents knowledge industries.

Anything longer then a paragraph is gray-literature.

Social revisions without communism are like care in the context of art. #☭ Send a a resignation letter to Left Alliance and a message to SKP to announce my eagerness to join the party. I don’t want to feel better – I want to do good.

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20210907

Preparing a workshop for Pori Art Museum. I’ll host a seminar for kids about p3rm46r4ff171 and serve them dirty waters. Later this week I’m running a workshop for Frame at the Experiments on Togetherness: Herding in Helsinki Central Par event. Exited to present my work in junction with Mari Keski-Korsu’s herbal-horse audio-meditation session. I’m preparing light gymnastics bundled with horse-behavioural theories and anecdotes about the Helsinki Mounted Police. The mounted polices night shift are planning to pass by to offer their greetings. The upcoming RH3 Frame publication, where I contributed a text titled “On the Other Side of the Paddock”, marks the closes I’ve gotten to Eyal Weizman. We are listed as contributors on a list which is organized alphabetically. Being the two last entries, we are only separated by the conjunction “and”, which is more then a comma but feels more intimate.* I’m referring to Weizman in two upcoming texts (the other will be out on the 17th and the later published in a book on performance pedagogy).

DIY electronics are way more expensive then buying instruments used. I will have to put this hobby on hold. I decided to build Paths RYO a cycling sequential switch for developing my system towards a cybernetic device, possibly using the electronic qualities of different waters as inputs. I sourced the pcb from an online shop in the US, electronics from Digikey, some rare components from Banzai Music (Germany) and odd bits and bobs locally from Uraltone. Just the mail, vat & service fee expenses of the packages would covered the costs of a used unit. Making by hand is more expensive then getting the same factory built. It might also be more ecological. I think I’m diy-ing stuff only to make myself feel better about being a consumer. Also sourcing parts for an Aperture unit (and I want it just for fun).

DIY-ing new modules
to hide all traces of my
consumerism

Today is an anniversary of EWS 1# and someone called “Petsamo” has added it as a tourist attraction to openstreetmap! I’m proud to say they have classified it as an artwork (a mural to be specific).

*edit. Got to ask Weizman a question on a Frame/RH3 related discussion & chat! Bassam El Baroni conveyed my question: Does intuition have a role in investigation? Weizman explains that they don’t know what intuition is but that investigations are involved with imagination. They explained that truths are simple and lies require imagination. Does this make counter-investigations processes where imaginative effects are removed? They continue depicting imaginations as having a fogging characteristic, which is obstructing the truth. I’m disappointed by the response. I don’t think truths are rational (simple) #ॐ. I don’t think counter-investigations necessarily reveal  rationalities (indoctrinated racism and biases etc.), they reveal something horrible: War machines are not liable because they don’t make any sense.

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20210905

“The White Exhibition” at Emma museum caused a scandal during the summer but I haven’t read anything about it since. Artists Sofie Hesselholdt and Vibeke Mejlvang aimed to explore whiteness trough a vast museum exhibition. Their text We can’t believe we still have to protest this shit (2021) is provocative and offers thorough insight to their artistic aims. I like what they are after and the look of the ragged flags in the exhibition.

The exhibition is another step in our ongoing quest to question and reject old hierarchical patterns so as to create spaces of inclusiveness. In a world of dichotomies, of Us and Them, we find it urgent to unify, to define a common We, a global solidarity. To start all over again.

Soon after the exhibition opened an article Emma-museossa puhkesi kiista tanssijoiden palkoista ja työajoista [A disagreement in Emma-museum over dancers wages and work terms] (2021) Pekka Torvinen revealed, that four performers who had been commissioned for a durational performance had been in contact with the Trade Union for Theatre and Media Finland (Teme) because the contract the museum had offered was unfair.

The exhibition artists had developed a performance, which was centred on choreographies related to maintenance. The performances were structured with tight schedules, similar as factory work and required daily presence by the performers. Hesselholdt & Mejlvang described the performance as the “heart of the exhibition”. To cut cost the museum sought to have the performance executed by students, who were attached to the show as trainees. As the working conditions and the function of the performance was revealed, the students organised and sought to make their contract just. I think they were really brave to do so (send them a compliment over email). They wanted a reasonable fee and I think they also wanted to be acknowledged as artists.

The article by Torvinen portrays the actions of Emma director Pilvi Kalhaman in a very negative light. According to this source Kalhama insists that their plan to use trainees was motivated by a desire to offer young artists a foothold in the field of art. They also argued that as the choreographies were not planned by the performers, an artist fee for the performers would have been unreasonable. Feels weird… Particularly in an emerging post-covid reality. The artists need the performers, who need the audience. The entire art affair insists that all parties participate equally. It makes absolutely no sense to pay a performer less then choreographer (or the audience).

As I understand it, most of the performers walked out from the production but I’m unsure what happened to the performance. I would like to know how Hesselholdt & Mejlvang felt about these debates and if the series of events had an impact in their praxis. Did this scandal motivate them to explore the conditions of class, capital and wage-labour further? Did the event effect their understanding of whiteness, does it have even more shades now? Interestingly the fee the artists were offered is close to the hourly wage of museum attendants. How did they feel about the entire debate?

The exhibition artists are using a picture from the performance as the front page of their website and comments on the exhibition performance documentation are turned off.