Ki Nurmenniemi

The difficult art of be(com)ing with

‘Beings with’ – the wonder and trouble of togetherness

This essay was originally published in the catalogue of the first Fiskars Village Art & Design Biennale, 2019. The contemporary art part of the biennale, titled Beings with, delved into the wonders and troubles of togetherness. From symbiotic to other kinds of interdependencies, questions of coexistence connected the artworks in the exhibition. In many ways, my curatorial work was guided by one of the ever-pertinent challenges of so called human existence: how can one become better at living together and dealing with differences? 

The artworks selected or commissioned for the exhibition, from these eighteen artists, utilized a wide range of artistic methods and languages to explore the ways in which human lives have evolved with and continue to be shaped by extra-human forces. They also tackled human attempts to make sense of and master each other and the rest of the planet-dwellers. The artists’ approaches varied wildly from abstraction to immersion to participatory situations. One common nominator was the willingness to explore how an artist’s work is always shaped by a mesh of invisible forces and material agencies, instead of individual artists creating sublime visions in a vacuum. Many of the artists in the exhibition are happily breaking this myth, acknowledging that every form of life is inseparable from the ecosystems that support it, whatever our part in life.

I am grateful to the following artists for joining me on this journey: Lene Baadsvig Ørmen, Leah Beeferman, Marjolijn Dijkman, Ramina Habibollah, Johannes Heldén, Alma Heikkilä, Dambi Kim, Jaana Laakkonen, Tuomas A. Laitinen, Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, Candice Lin, Elina Minn & Co., nabbteeri, Laura Põld, Aki Sasamoto, Raimo Saarinen, Tove Storch, and Louise Waite. 

Making is always collaboration, being is always togetherness. Living in an illusion of autonomy, we fail to perceive the non-human elements that support our existence. (1)

A symbiotic take on life 

Beings with takes a look at life on earth from a symbiotic perspective. This framework is a mixture of disciplines, emerging strands of theory, speculative approaches, and ecologically oriented practices. In the past few decades, a lot has happened within contemporary art that concerns itself with ecology. A transition is happening from ‘environmental art’ to increasingly complex and entangled approaches that consider the interplay between social, political and economic processes, human technologies, and the planet’s ecosystems. 

The inaugural Fiskars Village Art & Design Biennale opens at the moment of the escalating climate crisis, ecosystemic breakdown, and deepening rifts between conflicting worldviews. As I received the invitation to curate this exhibition, I felt the need to use this opportunity to share some of the key learnings from the past seven years that I have spent working at the intersection of contemporary art and emerging ecological paradigms. (2)

All human-centered systems, the realm of art included, need to undergo rapid changes if human societies are to be continued. The required measures are massive in scale and scope, and yet they have to begin with everyone realizing how their life depends on the wellbeing of countless other beings – regardless of how alienated from each other and from the life-supporting ecosystems we might currently feel. This shift calls for shaking some very fundamental ideas about how the world works. 

A pioneering biologist, Lynn Margulis, put key ideas of the symbiotic worldview into words in her 1998 title Symbiotic Planet. She looks into how life has evolved through different species making opportunities for each other and creating new lifeforms together. She builds a strong argument for interspecies cooperation being the true driving force of evolution, instead of competition. (3)

“No matter how much our own species preoccupies us, life is a far wider system. Life is an incredibly complex interdependence of matter and energy among millions of species beyond and within our own skin. These Earth aliens are our relatives, our ancestors, and part of us. They cycle our matter and bring us water and food. Without “the other” we do not survive.” (4)

Matter, meaning, modes of knowing

The starting point for this exhibition was the idea of connectedness and cooperation as key principles of life. What needs to be stressed, though, is that these interdependencies are not harmonious affairs. The tricky art of living together is one key to the exhibition. Another is the toxic habit of ‘othering’, the tendency to establish and maintain divisive lines within and between cultures. Wherever there are imaginary or concrete boundaries forcefully maintained, there is also violence, subjugation, and struggle. 

The word ‘beings’ in the exhibition’s title does not refer to any fixed modes of existence. It does not refer to individual entities with stable boundaries, but to being as becoming, in plural and in flux. Becoming has been a buzzword since some time now, but already the Greek philosopher Heraklitus summed up this approach with: “everything flows, nothing remains” (5). More recent explorations of the dynamic enfolding of phenomena have been made by feminist new materialist thinkers, such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Rosi Braidotti, who continue to spark and challenge my thinking (6). 

Matter and meaning are not separate elements. They are inextricably fused together and no event, no matter how energetic, can tear them asunder. Even atoms, whose very name (atomos), means ‘indivisible’ or ‘uncuttable’, can be broken apart. But matter and meaning cannot be dissociated, not by chemical processing, or centrifuge, or nuclear blast (7).

The artists in Beings with investigate the entanglements of matter and meaning without the aim to deliver any single message or coherent storylines. They are interested in diverse processes of knowledge formation and engage simultaneously in conceptual as well as material thinking. This can open up surprising possibilities for being and knowing. 

The exhibition as a whole explores different means and modes of knowing that challenge the dualisms that the Western, scientific worldview has been built upon. Disrupting binary opposites, such as subject-object, nature-culture, and the racialized and gendered manifestations of these divisions, is the underlying curatorial motivation of the show. However, this does not happen through direct, explicitly ‘political’ gestures, but through layered processes, subtle contrasting of materials and multisensory means. Enfolding slowly and gently. 

From control to care

With this exhibition, things do not seem to be completely under anyone’s control. The presented artworks have been made with materials that all act in their distinct ways, forming content instead of just conveying messages. Some of the artworks seem to be only partly shaped by human influence. Many of the works will undergo significant transformations throughout the summer months. In the exhibition where many of the artists recognize the agency of countless beings and materials that contribute to their work, processes such as growth, decay, erosion, and evaporation are playing important roles. Some of the works grow mold, some are leaking and staining their surroundings, others include evaporating elements or biochemical processes. The works are precarious, fragile and unpredictable, calling for constant attentiveness and care. 

The question of coexistence shifts from a human-centric perspective to considering the ways in which humans, their planetmates, and different technologies are entangled in the process of co-creating this current version of life on earth (8). In practice, this means that in Beings with, humans are not in the limelight, there are also no direct attempts to represent other beings. There are no intact, immaculate image surfaces, but fragmented, layered, or dispersed elements that one has to view from several vantage points. Instead of trying to deliver linear narratives, a single message or a manifesto, the exhibition aims at weaving together micronarratives without clear beginnings or endings. 

These kind of mesh-like or tentacular works have multiple folds. One criterion for the artworks was that they could not be translated into a single image or a clear message. They demand focused attention and relating to them by moving around them. Finding meaning from this kind of mesh calls for attentiveness. We did not want to bring to Fiskars art that the audiences would be already familiar or comfortable with. Focusing on layered tangles of aesthetic and conceptual codes might feel arduous, but what I personally find exciting with this approach is that there is no need to navigate this show according to any given coordinates. It simply isn’t possible!

Our wonderful exhibition guides picked up the underlying vibrations within Beings with to be sensitivity, violence, and humor, and I think this analysis brilliantly captures the entangled forces that I was curious to explore with this show. However, instead of relying on any given guidelines, I hope that the visitors would allow their own associations to emerge out of their personal experiences. 

Contexts within contexts

Beings with has been strongly shaped by its context, and there have been various overlapping frameworks that have influenced the exhibition’s concept and realization. Firstly, it could not be reproduced in any other location or moment: It has been curated uniquely for Fiskars Village and its particular venues. Instead of commissioning all new artworks, it includes also existing works that have been adapted to this environment in one way or another. 

In this book, the artworks and artists appear in the order which I had in mind for encountering them in the exhibition, starting from the Threshing House, following the Fiskars River flowing from upstream all the way down to the little green nook across the stream from the Granary. Needless to say, the exhibition can and should be navigated in ways that feel the most appealing to every visitor at a given moment. 

Another framework to be considered is Luovi’s vision to bring contemporary art, design, and crafts onto a shared platform. In the beginning, we did not know exactly how these fields would coexist in Fiskars. I was thrilled to learn about the design curator Jasper Morrison’s idea for the Social Seating exhibition that, in its brilliant simplicity, encourages people to take a seat to enjoy the riverside. Importantly, there was also the question of how the local community of artists, designers, and practitioners of various crafts would welcome the visiting curators, artists, and designers. Onoma, the cooperative of artisans, designers and artists in Fiskars, showcases some wonderful examples of what is being designed and manufactured locally in the Factory exhibition, curated by Anniina Koivu. Her section of the biennale looks at contemporary processes of design manufacturing, and how the newest technologies complement traditional artisanship. 

For this show, I did not travel the world visiting artists’ studios: many of the participating artists I have been in conversation with for several years, and we have had wonderful dialogues, but also debated fiercely along the way. Some of the artists I have been following and admiring from a distance and this Biennale provided the first opportunity to work with them. So with togetherness in mind, Beings with has been shaped by long-term relationships: close friendships, companionships, and other kinds of exchanges (9). 

I wished the selected artworks to be in close conversation with each other, even though they might be speaking different aesthetic or conceptual languages. One criterion for the works was that they could survive under constantly changing, uncontrollable circumstances – as the exhibition venues were far from conventional gallery or museum spaces. The Threshing House was basically a shed without heating or proper electricity and the wind was blowing in from the gaps between the wall boards. The Granary was only a slightly more robust construction. This being said, both buildings, with their rich layers of history, are amazing venues for exhibiting art. The buildings not only provide the setting for the exhibition, they are an important part of it. 

It was crucial to my curatorial approach that most of the artists would visit Fiskars before fixing the plans on what to exhibit there. Not only would they gain a sense of the place, its history, and present-day dynamics, but the visits also provided an opportunity to get to know each other’s work and develop ideas together. Fleeting as these shared moments were, I would like to believe that they will feed new collaborations. Exhibition productions are often intense and chaotic, but they do have the potential to foster new connections and communities within the ecosystems of art. 

Solar Scenarios and Sharing Space

The thin line between the indoor and outdoor spaces, and the exposure to the elements that this brought about became part of the exhibition’s concept. The river that runs through the village became a connecting element between the two buildings. Harnessed in the 17th century for water power, it fuelled Fiskars’ development into the cradle of industrial development in Finland. Besides water, another integral element shaping the exhibition is the sunlight, or its absence, depending on the weather patterns over the changing seasons. This is especially visible in Threshing House, where the Sun peeks in through the walls and, on bright days, floods the space through the skylight windows. 

The solar basis of the world as we know it is also the subject matter of Alma Heikkilä’s installation relating to or determined by the sun (2015–2019), whereas the amount of sunlight will effectively influence how Raimo Saarinen’s closed biotopes from his Skenaario (2018) series will evolve during the summer. The opening piece for the exhibition, Marjolijn Dijkman’s immersive video installation Navigating Polarities (2017–2018) also touches upon how Sun and its position in relation to Earth set the principles and laws according to which all earthly life is ultimately organised. 

The part of Threshing House most exposed to light is where Jaana Laakkonen, working together with paint, transparent fabrics, mountings, and various other materials practices sharing space and agencies. Dispersed or layered in the large hall Some bodies know where the body of mine is – entangled, a stranger; we aren't no bodies, and this is our name (2019) aims not to master but to make space, inhabit it in as gentle way as possible.

There is always challenge with letting go of control and making space for ‘others’. While I am writing this, we have just found out that there is a community of bats living inside the Threshing House. I find this very fitting considering the exhibitions overarching theme. Their presence was revealed to us only after the building was renovated and opened for the public, thanks to their nocturnal rhythm. Now we will just have to learn ways of co-existing in a way that poses no threat neither to the artworks nor to the bats. 

Eroding ideologies and knowledge forms

The troubled sides of coexistence and critical re-reading of particular histories are an important part of the exhibition. Candice Lin, for instance, constructs leaking systems and fragile sculptural landscapes to examine how the current world order has been shaped by the subjugation of countless beings that have been viewed as ‘the other’, as inferior to the dominant figure of the white ‘Man’. In The slow erosion of a hard white body (Chinese water torture) (2018), a piece of unfired porcelain is been subjected to the 19th century punitive practice of water torture, stereotypically associated with Chinese culture in the West. Porcelain, as well as the plants used in the liquid that erodes it, have all played important parts in the history of imperialism and colonization. The desires for certain raw materials, fashion, and fads continue to shape the world economy, global power dynamics, and people’s life trajectories.

The desire for knowledge is another catalyst for much subjugation and suffering. At the Granary, Anthology of Performance Pieces for Animals (2018) – a sculptural series by Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens – looks into the gruesome and partly absurd history of research on animal cognition. The artists have made colorful miniature models of experiments conducted over a 119-year period, displayed in a museological manner inside two long, brightly lit vitrines. However, instead of representing the animals as passive subjects of study, the artists have reframed them as if they were participants in performance situations. Some of the sculptures are accompanied by handwritten ‘scores’, detailed descriptions of the experiment in question. With this performative approach, the artists are interested in seeing what happens when the experiments and their subjects are seen from a perspective that grants the animals slightly more agency. 

Personal measures

The idea that the measuring apparatus available affects what exactly can be known or measured, is one starting point for Leah Beeferman’s work and for her photographic series Measures (2017–2018). Shot at different locations across the Northern regions in Finland and Norway, the digital prints show landscapes as contingent constructions, formed by overlapping sensations, experiences, pre-existing discursive framings, the accustomed ways of looking, the technical devices available, and, inevitably, the process of abstraction. Leah’s immersion in these environments produces abstracted yet personal images. The folding fabrics that she prints them on gives them a heightened sense of materiality. By the Fiskars river, Leah’s first ever outdoor piece, Seasons are opposites, paradoxes, inversions, extremes, versions, reflections 1 (Kilpisjärvi, Nuuksio) (2019), will introduce the added element of a dialogue with the constantly changing environment.

The changing surroundings also play a part in Tove Storch’s new sculptural work, situated by the stream behind the Granary. The untitled piece consists of 75 unique, glazed ceramic plates on thin metal legs, forming a horizontal plateau at a table-height amidst the trees. In the course of the summer, water, pollen, flower petals, and leaves will gather on the surfaces of the plates, the grass and hay will grow tall and partly camouflage the sculpture when viewed from a longer distance. Instead of being a solid object or a sleek surface, the work opens for encounters, inviting the visitors to become part of it by walking in the spaces between the plates.  

Experimenting, fermenting 

At the top floor of the Granary, Aki Sasamoto’s video Do Nut Diagram (2018) uses different tactics to disrupt the idea of solid surfaces and scenarios. An ant traveling the sugar-coated surface of a doughnut hovering in mid-air, a Venn diagram featuring that same doughnut...It’s all very circular. Aki’s works often tackle labour, and this time she has opened a portal into a space where the spirit world meets mundane everyday routines. Wearing dark green overalls, Aki shows up to perform various tasks moving across the image surface, while wind instruments on the soundtrack create a porous sonic landscape. To quote the poem accompanying the video: Sooner or later, All possible scenarios ferment (10).

The spirit world is also present in Lene Baadsvig Ørmen’s aluminum sculptures, displayed in the Granary and outdoors by the river. Lene is interested in the cyclical notion of time, as well as the underlying beliefs behind spiritual practices. This is visible in the figurative traces within her more abstract forms. Some of them recall talisman-like figurines, such as the largest piece in the series, n0thing (2018). It is a wishing well guarded by the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, a solar deity associated with both healing and warfare. In her workshop in Oslo, Lene has developed her own, exploratory method to sand cast the sculptures, allowing the material more freedom than in the traditional, more predetermined technique. 

Exploratory and experimental methods are integral also to Tuomas A. Laitinen’s work. In recent years, his research has been revolving around the entangled existence, extended minds, and materials that can operate as conduits or mediators for experience. For example, Tuomas has been looking into how copper and glass circulate and how they have made various technologies possible, but also explored their metaphysical and mythical properties. His open-ended installation, Dossier of Osmosis (2018) combines glass sculptures, active biochemical processes, light, text, and ultrasonic sound, among many others. The guiding idea is porosity and the openness of association. With this, Tuomas wishes to shake the conventional thought patterns and categorizations that we have learnt to rely upon to make sense of the world. 

Louise Waite is also seeking for new perspectives through the use of unconventional artistic materials. She prepares varying kinds of dough to bake her ideas into works of art. At Fiskars, she has baked architectural details of the Granary into her bread sculptures, exhibited together with their clay molds. Despite their soft appearance, there is a sharper edge to the work, as Louise baked pieces of slag brick into the breads. As a more gentle gesture, Louise also baked and shared coal black bread with the Biennale’s artists, designers, curators, and opening guests. The color was informed by the dark slag brick walls of the Granary, as well as the dark tones of the ground, and it was achieved through the use of activated charcoal. 

Another artist exploring the possibilities of shared multisensory experiences is the tea artist Dambi Kim. Last year, I got to experience her tea ceremony in her tea room in Seoul, which was a transformative experience. With quite little material means, Dambi created an atmosphere of relaxed calm. The focus was in other than visual aspects, but I do remember being served a bright blue infusion. Dambi also prepares incense, and the visitor might notice an occasional burning incense as a trace of her presence in Fiskars. Dambi’s incense-making workshop and tea ceremonies will happen in Mid-July. 

Interspecies co-existence and interstellar travels

Whereas some artists turn to scientific methods and findings in their work, others adopt speculative approaches and science fiction in their world re-imagining and rebuilding. Both tactics carry the potential to speed up change when things seem to get too stagnant. Here, speculative and science fiction do not stand for escapism, but provide ways to see our current cultures from unexpected angles while expanding the scope of what seems possible. 

“There has never been a better time to be brave and pushing outward in our storytelling. Not because we wish for ecological collapse to create new stories for us, but because we hope for reconciliation. We hope that the limits of our imaginations are not what we fear they are, and that we can reach beyond those limits to find a kind of balance. We hope for ways in which the human experience can merge with the “natural,” so that nature and culture become one with the least harm to either, and so that we understand and share the ghosts of both” (11).

In his artworks that fuse together poetry, sound, digital animation, and hand-painted elements, Johannes Heldén turns to science fiction in imagining prospects for future life – within and beyond our solar system. What kinds of trajectories will life take with accelerating climate crisis, mass extinctions, and DNA manipulation? Through a method of de-familiarisation (remapping the strange onto the familiar) he allows us to see our own planet, its plants and animals with refreshed eyes. By the Fiskars river, we get to hear Field Guide to Future Planets (2019) – notes from the journal of an interstellar traveler shipwrecked on a distant planet. Johannes often uses the familiar formats of an encyclopedia and taxonomic classification to classify imaginary species and phenomena. He is curious about humanity’s search for patterns in nature and existence, in order to understand them, control them and thus attain a sense of security. 

Another artist imagining interstellar futures, Ramina Habibollah, is equally inspired by the underwater worlds and the possibilities they hold for life’s evolution. Ramina has developed a highly iridescent aesthetic language through working with light and layering and contrasting synthetically produced and naturally occurring materials. In Fiskars, she is showing a two-part installation, Violent Universe (2018), that brings together the dimensions of the deep space and the deep sea.

With Laura Põld’s new collaborative work, Natural Shelter (2019), a series of ceramic sculptures resembling bird nests and polypores inhabit the two old grain containers at the Granary’s ground floor. The sculptures seem to be growing from walls and ceilings of the silos, complemented by flatscreens showing bird-themed poetry by the Estonian poet Katrin Väli. Impressed by the skilled construction techniques mastered by birds and alarmed by the loss of habitats they are experiencing thanks to forest cutting and changing climate, Laura and Katrin decided to work together on a bird-centered piece. 

The artist duo nabbteeri, for their part, has been focusing on their everyday encounters with the small, spineless critters that humans are usually too preoccupied to notice. On their video, Thinking of invertebrates (2017), 3D animated sequences are joined with spoken travelogue entries from the artists’ residency period in Serbia (12).

Equipped with spines, humans have developed ways of moving that make use of this feature. Dramaturg Elina Minn with their working group explore other kinds of movement capacities through the use of shared eco-somatic exercises. In their experiential performance, Hydra, they have been trying out sponge-like modes of being through bodywork and touch. In Fiskars, they will work on widening human-typical movement repertoires by drawing inspiration from local ecosystems. Minor shifts in our bodily existence might sometimes result in major changes.

The exhibition invites the visitors to slow down, to focus their attention and attune to the signals, materials, and processes that shape the fabric of the everyday but easily go unnoticed amidst its hum and rumble. Instead of offering a mere visual spectacle, Beings with strives to feed diverse senses and imagination. The invited artists have cultivated practices that escape the accustomed logic of representation and instead try to make palpable the invisible threads that connect our lives to the cosmos. 

Life teems and takes new forms when beings rub against each other. As dead-locked as things might seem, everything on this planet is always in flux. Symbioses can be mutually beneficial or not, but they are happening everywhere. 

In addition to all the wonderful beings who made this exhibition possible, I would especially like to thank Riikka Thitz, the Assistant Curator of Beings with, whose friendship and contribution to this project has been invaluable. 

Jenni Nurmenniemi

2 June 2019, Helsinki, Finland

Footnotes

(1) An excerpt from artist Alma Heikkilä’s text which you can find in full length here: www.almaheikkila.net/things-that-are-massively-distribut (23.9.2019).

(2) My work has been largely informed by the 5-year project Frontiers in Retreat – Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ecology in Contemporary Art (2013–2018).

(3) Margulis, L. 1998. Symbiotic Planet. A New Look at Evolution. New York, Basic Books, 39–49.

(4) Margulis, L. 1998. Symbiotic Planet. A New Look at Evolution. New York, Basic Books, 110.

(5) The Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c.535–c.475 BC), as quoted by Plato in Cratylus, 402a. Also translated as: “the whole flows (as a river)”, or “everything flows, nothing stands still”.

(6) See also: http://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/body/becoming.html. ‘Becoming’, by Joan Cassar. (30.5.2019).

(7) Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham & London, Duke University Press. 3.

(8) The influence of thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Rosi Braidotti is evident, but the exhibition concept has also been inspired by my favourite science and speculative fiction writers, such as N.K. Jemisin, Jeff VanderMeer, Nnedi Okorafor, Emmi Itäranta, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Tracey Warr.

(9) Artist residency programmes such as HIAP (Helsinki) as well as ISCP and Residency Unlimited (New York) have made many of these encounters possible, for which I am deeply grateful.

(10) The poem that accompanies the video ‘Do Nut Diagram’ (2018) by artist Aki Sasamoto: https://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/do-nut-diagram (2.6.2019).

(11) The author Jeff VanderMeer in his introduction to Johannes Heldén’s ‘Astroecology’ (2018): the wind tears apart the signal. https://johanneshelden.com/thewindtearsapartthesignal (2.6.2019).

(13) Their residency was part of the European Union funded project Frontiers in Retreat – Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ecology in Contemporary Art (2013–2018), initiated and coordinated by HIAP and led by Jenni Nurmenniemi.