Wrong Address – Special Project for the Fourth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art 2011

Seven artists suggesting re-assessments

On September 22, the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art opens its fourth edition. Titled “Rewriting Worlds’’ it will run until October 30 and features artists from more than 33 countries. The Moscow Biennale is curated by Peter Weibel, Director of ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany.

The Wrong Address -exhibition is one of the Special Projects of the Fourth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. It is curated by Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger, the chief curator at the Finnish Museum of Photography. The exhibition is a mutual adaptation of the sharp-witted works of seven artists, on the common theme of “being in the wrong place” and “going to the wrong address”. This “wrong address” uncovers surprising values and attitudes, and suggests re-assessments. As in Jarkko Räsänen’s series of photographs Ordered Dance (2009), a recognizable image is by definition out of place. With the aid of image-processing software developed by Räsänen himself, a digital photograph is chopped into thin slices and re-arranged according to a specific system. The photographs’ original subjects slip into being abstract forms, and the visual and material properties of the pictures overtake their narrative content.

A common feature of many of the works in the Wrong Address exhibition is a transcendence of categories by means of empathy or humour. A precondition of affinity and empathy is the ability to situate oneself outside of oneself, away from one’s own place, so as to imagine things from other people’s viewpoints. In his Unfinished series (2010) Tero Puha has, for more than ten years now, been recording in black-and-white portraits the sex-reassignment process undergone by individuals of various ages. Transgender people are born in an in-between state, and in seeking a complete life they have to reconstruct their bodies and social identities. In his photographs Puha tries to show the transgender person’s emotional states when looking in the mirror. What do other people’s gazes feel like?

Humour enters into an alliance with the viewer in the works of Pilvi Takala, Minna Suoniemi and Johanna Heldebro. Takala’s Real Snow White (2009) shows the situation at the gates of Disneyland when a visitor tries to get in dressed in a Snow-White costume. The absurd logic of a “real” fairy-tale character is revealed when the theme park’s staff explain why a visitor dressed as Snow White has to stay outside the gates. Suoniemi’s videowork BAT (2008) shows a female figure hanging upside down in a forest. This animal-like woman becomes an observer of both the limits of humanity and of the world outside the picture. Meanwhile, in Heldebro’s To Come Within Reach of You (2009), spying on her father, who disappeared after his divorce from her mother, is both literally and metaphorically a matter of being in the wrong place, and of narrativity and the definition of obsession.

Minna Suoniemi, Bat, 2008

Many of Taus Makhacheva’s performative works receive their geopolitical and cultural-political context from the background of the artist. Makhacheva comes from the Caucasus, from the Islamic republic of Dagestan, which is a federal subject of Russia, which is populated by more than 30 ethnic groups and where more than 30 languages are spoken. Makhacheva’s Endeavour can be read to comment on the social or political balance; the balance between an individual’s hopes and endeavours and the prevailing reality; and the fine line between the static and the moving, and the intellectual and the imaginative in an image. Makhacheva asks whether the video could be seen as an analogy of an artist’s role in society. Would society be ready for change?

The exhibition is curated by Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger (Chief Curator, the Finnish Museum of Photography) together with visual artist Tero Puha.

The exhibition is supported by FRAME – Finnish Fund for Art Exchange, Arts Council of Finland, The Finnish Museum of Photography (Helsinki), Gallery Inutero (Moscow) and Embassy of Finland (Moscow).

Wrong Address 24.9. – 31.10.2011
Galleria Panopticon INUTERO (Moscow, Nizhnyaya Syromyatnicheskaya st., 5/7, bldg 9, ARTPLAY)

Artists: Johanna Heldebro, Taus Makhacheva, Maria Kirdan, Tero Puha, Jarkko Räsänen, Minna Suoniemi and Pilvi Takala
Curator: Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger