The Loop of the Month portrays works from Kisama's video and media arts collection. A group of artists and curators choose the monthly thematic work, analogy or compilation. The video collection links the artists to other production or, through the selected theme, to other works. The programme also features two festivals: Pixelache University in March and Avanto in November.

Avanto Festival: Ken Jacobs

Star Spangled To Death

Ken Jacob's Star Spangled to Death, infused with a beatnik spirit, is a testament of 20^th century America. The project began way back in 1957, growing out of the cosmic costume and role improvisations of Jack Smith, Jerry Sims and a few other underground visionaries. Due to a non-existent budget and broken-down conditions, shooting on the film progressed in fits and starts during the 1960s and 1970s. In 2004, thanks to the participation of Jacobs's daughter Nisi, it was at last completed.

At the heart of the nearly seven-hour epic are the staged passages shot by Jacobs, which are then juxtaposed with baffling archival footage from the history of the moving image. The work makes use of clips from animation, educational movies, news reports, propaganda films - even Richard Nixon's famous 1952 "Checkers speech" appears in its entirety. Star Spangled to Death works on two levels: as an ethically unforgiving declaration on behalf of individualism and freedom of speech, and as a subtle depiction of what personal cinema, at its core, can be.

-Mika Taanila
Artist's choice


Ken Jacobs (USA)
Star Spangled To Death, 1957-2004

Starring: Jack Smith, Jerry Sims, Gib Taylor, Bill Carpenter, Cecilia Swan, Laurie Taylor,
Bob Fleischner, Reese Haire, Jim Enterline, Ken Jacobs
Line-editor: Nisi Jacobs
Duration: 6 hours 40 minutes, dvd
Screenings: Wed-Sun, 11 am-6.30 pm including breaks

I selected two video works for the Loop of the Month that represent differently the possibilities of examining our existence in our surroundings and our perception of the world with moving image. My choices are Maria Duncker's Bloom (2006) and my own work A Life of One's Own (a long tomorrow) (2008).

Duncker herself has described her work thus: "Bloom is a small-scale attempt to achieve the heavenly state by diving into a cherry tree". To me Bloom is a work that highlights the joy of observing the present by showing the beauty opening up in nature. Ducker shot cherry flowers seemingly randomly with a moving camera. The images are stills and yet they change so fast that the work functions like an animation. Tuomo Puranen's music gives the work to a deceptively light mood, but the rapidly changing still images remind the viewer of the transient and unreachable nature of instant moments.

My video work A Life of One's Own is a short story-like science fiction tale accompanied by images that are processed to be almost abstract. It tells the story of an imaginary future where the tropical zone has extended all the way to Southern Scandinavia due to climate change. To his misfortune, the narrator is stuck in a basement bunker in an area that corresponds geographically to Helsinki's current location.

These two works are linked to each other by the importance of remembering the beauty of fleeting moments. At the moment of despair you can recall past beauty and happiness.

Kari Yli-Annala

The order of screening
Kari Yli-Annala, Oma elämä (pitkä huominen), 2008
Maria Duncker, Bloom, 2006

Kari Yli-Annala, A Life of One's Own (a long tomorrow), 2008
Maria Duncker, Bloom, 2006

Maria Duncker
Bloom, 2006
single-channel video
format: MiniDV
music: Tuomo Puranen
duration 04:06 min

Kari Yli-Annala
Oma elämä (pitkä huominen), 2008
single-channel video

directing, script, editing, image-processing, sounds & music: Kari Yli-Annala
poem quoted: Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
duration 10:00 min

A Life of One's Own (a long tomorrow), 2008
single-channel video

directing, script, editing, image-processing, sounds & music: Kari Yli-Annala
poem quoted: Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
duration 08:00 min

Erkki Kurenniemi ja Sami van Ingen

The two works I chose for this display are somewhat different in approach and very different in technique.
However, both pieces, at least how I see them, deal with scale and the concept of using industrial products as source materials.
If there is a dialogue within these two artworks, it comes from the perpetual need for us to look at our manufactured world more closely.

Electronics in the World of Tomorrow by Erkki Kurenniemi is a vigorous 5 minute video, where he focused on the, then new, esthetics of electronic technology.

By expanding the little transistors into a new scale, he builds in front of us architectural like spaces and with intriguing cut off shots gives them a perspective to the "real world".

Expanding is an extension of my workings with found footage films, maybe a sculptural version of such a process.
Here I have taken an optical toy and by using recycled materials recreated it in a larger size.

Sami van Ingen

The Loop of the Month for August comprises three works that focus attention on situations that are constantly repeated throughout the day and to which we usually pay little or no particular heed, such as the repetitive "clunk-clunk" when car wheels drive over a loose manhole cover in the street. Talk to me (fragment) portrays this frequently unnoticed sound element that is an integral part of the urban scene.

Finitudes shows you a cloud landscape being pushed past the window of an aeroplane and you witness how new clouds ceaselessly become distorted by the edges of the window in the passenger cabin, as if the window edges were sucking up the clouds and reshaping them by stretching their contours. The event is slow and because it is repetitive, the viewer knows to expect a change in the appearance of the next cloud approaching the window.

The voice of a small child in the third work, the Neighbour's House, persistently repeats the phrase, "mami, tule auttamaan" (Mommy, come and help me). In the image, you see venetian blinds and the effects created when the cameraman's sleeve is twitched: the house behind the venetian blinds comes into view from time to time.

In Loop of the Month, you see predictable events and wonder how the experience of looking changes under the impact of repetition.

May 2008
Denise Ziegler

Elina Saloranta, Artist's Choice

Pure (2002) is a five-part video work based on letters found in my family. The letters were written in 1942-1999, and they reflect my family history as well as the changes in society in those years. The texts also raise questions about the event of writing itself: how is life given a narrative form, and what kind of cultural stories influence them on the background?

I finished the video during my studies in the United States, and therefore languages and translation became an integral part of the work. Retaining the original languages of the letters, Finnish and French, was important to me, yet I had to leave space for the English subtitles. In the end I started to see the ribbon of text running at the foot of the screen as an independent image, which is completely detached from the image in the second part of the video.

Monique Moumblow uses subtitling in an even more radical way in her work Sleeping Car (2000). The soundtrack is spoken in Swedish with English subtitles running at the bottom of the image. If you know both languages, you'll soon understand that the text is not a translation of the spoken language. The end credits reveal that the soundtrack is Ingrid Thulin's monologue from Ingmar Bergman's film Winter Light (1963). Yet Moumblow has not used Thulin's monologue as such, but instead she has picked out certain sentences. This creates a multi-layered montage with different texts gleaming through one another.

Elina Saloranta


Monique Moumblow
1971, lives and works in Montreal, Canada
Makuuvaunu / Sovvagnen / Sleeping Car, 2000
5:38 min

Elina Saloranta
1968, lives and works in Helsinki
Puhdas / Ren /Pure, 2002
bw, shot on 16 mm film, transferred to video
29:23 min

Anu Pennanen, artist’s choice

Les Halles

The French love the term carte blanche. It means blank paper: choose whatever you like. Jean-Luc Godard, for example, was allowed to freely choose a series of five films for the Cinémathèque Française. Our prevailing economic system is forever promising us carte blanche "You decide! You choose! You're special!"

One of the most melancholic experiences of my life was a November evening at Les Halles, the largest metro station-shopping mall-leisure complex in Europe. Alongside thousands of others I was trudging towards home on the metro after a hard day at work. I observed the Parisian habitus of my fellow people. A strong feeling that we had all been had was creeping over me. We had been told we were different, special, just a blouse or pair of shoes away from being in complete control of our lives. As a matter of fact we were all the same, transfixed, had no unlimited power of making decisions, clinging to the hem of the day with our blouses and tired feet shoved in our shoes. This similarity crosses all social and racial borders. It does not depend on you. You cannot do it. Luckily enough. A perfect individual needs nobody. But we who linger at Les Halles longer than it takes to move from one place to another do: the regular bench where the constant gang of old people gathers evey day at five to exhange gossip; a park for the boules group; girlfriends to dance with at the mall when the security guard looks the other way; an inconspicuous corner for sleeping the night in.

I have given 25 people I met at Les Halles a carte blanche of sorts. I asked them to film their personal view of the area on a three-minute cine reel. I interviewed them and other people I encountered at Les Halles about the past, present and future of the place. The pair I chose for my work comes from Kiasma's collections and is Ulf Lundin's video Station, made ten years ago, for which he filmed people on a bus stop and bus station without asking for their permission. In both works looking is compared to being looked at and public space chafes against the limits of the private. Ulf Lundin looks at people through the viewfinder of his camera. The filming routes I travelled with the people I met and their stories have opened for me vast views, details and focuses that I would not have been able to see with my own eyes only. There is no neutral documenting gaze. Could the gazes and thoughts that run to different directions cross and meet in the moment the exhibition visitor gives to the work?

Paris 3 June 2008 Anu Pennanen

Two works: Journey and Mountain
Elena Näsänen, artist’s choice



I have chosen to show two of my landscape-related works: Journey from 1996, which is one of my very first installations and now in Kiasma’s collections, and Mountain, finished in 2007.

In Journey, a tram follows the 3T line circling a route in central Helsinki. This tramline, popular with the tourists, travels through different parts of the city and through the change of seasons. The work was shot chronologically, one shot every ten days, at certain times of day in one year’s time.
 
Mountain concentrates on a single moment on the Yellow Mountain in China. Mount Huangshan is an extremely popular destination. In photographs the mountain looks distant and peaceful. Yet a stream of thousands of tourists courses up the paths built on the mountain side. The site is jammed like a department store during the sales. The sound the people make is deafening at times.

Soundscape has become an increasingly constant part of my work in the past ten or so years. When I was making Journey in 1996, I was above all interested in the enchantment of the moving image. Back then using sound had a minor part to play. Today sound has grown into an integral part of my working, while the image can be almost immobile, like in Mountain.

The installations are show together for the first time, making two works finished at different moments into one whole. There are allusions to traditional cinematic narration in the works, but they can also be seen as painterly, as studies of landscape and space.

Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, artist’s choice

I was asked to pick a work from Kiasma's media collection that has a strong relation to my own work. My instant choice was John Baldessari's seminal video-piece Baldessari Sings LeWitt (1972). The artist himself sings 35 statements from Sol LeWitts manifesto "Sentences on Conceptual Art" (1968) to the melody of popular songs. Contrasting this piece with my own work "Complaints Choir of Helsinki" (2006) (collaboration with Tellervo Kalleinen) I hope to illuminate not only the dependency of current contemporary art on the early conceptualism but also the journey we have behind us since the 70s.

Both the Complaints Choir and Baldessari's piece employ popular music to transform the original texts - in one case stern sentences on conceptual art, in the other a long list of daily complaints - into another state of reality. For Baldessari the use of popular tunes - among them the American anthem - ironically highlights the removal of conceptual art from daily life and popular culture. Although the basic premise of conceptual art was to provide "concepts" that could be filled with life by anybody, conceptual art stayed more often an art of the initiated. Baldessari tries to bridge this gap - he states in the beginning of the video: "By my singing [of these sentences] for you it perhaps will bring [them] to a much larger audience."

Intentionally or not, Baldessari falls back into the closed-circuit of conceptual art. We see the artist alone in his studio with the camera as his only witness. What starts as a humorous act becomes a struggle: not only for Baldessari to sing through his lines with his singing turning into a form of preaching (addressing the adherents of conceptual art), but also for the viewer do endure the merciless rigidity of the piece - so typical for the art of this time.

Without pieces like Baldessari's works such as Complaints Choir would not have been possible. We nevertheless tried to learn from Baldessari to escape the pitfalls of self-referential art. We tried to come up with a concept that is meaningful for people and their life without the need for any knowledge of conceptual art. The Choir takes its starting point from the irritation of daily life of the people living in Helsinki. If Baldessari is an ironic commentator on the gap between conceptual art and daily life, we see ourselves as facilitators of a collaborative process that bridges this gap.

The concept of Complaints Choir has inspired people around the globe [www.complaintschoir.org] We reacted to this by setting up a web-site with "9 Easy Steps to Create a Complaints Choir". People can organise their own choirs by following the tradition of the instructional pieces of conceptual art and fill the concept with life. Thus, Baldessari's singing has not fallen on deaf ears.

But what does Matti Nykänen has to do with all of this? The short clip Lahti Jumping Hill by Erkki Pirtola - just a tiny fraction of Pirtola's amazing archive of the wonders of everyday-life - shows that ski-jumping is still the most popular conceptual art form in Finland.

Pixelache University / Juha Huuskonen,
curator’s choice



Camera Lucida: Sonochemical Observatory, 2003-

Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand’s work The Camera Lucida reminds us of times, when the presentation of the newest technological inventions was great art and theatre. In addition to the artists, physics research laboratories have taken part in the development of the work. The work will be displayed in a completely dark space where the human eye will be able to see how ultrasonic waves in a fluid container change into light phenomena resembling the northern lights. Science has not yet been able to explain this phenomenon. There have even been hopes that it might provide the solution for the production of fusion power.
Dmitry Gelfand (s. 1974) & Evelina Domnitch (s.1972) live and work in Amsterdam

Eija Aarnio, Curator’s choice



Remarks on Color, 1994

Remarks on Color captures a child's struggle to learn a language. Gary Hill's daughter Anastasia is reading out from the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's book in German. With deep breaths and pauses, she reads the first 88 of the 350 remarks on colour. The text discusses the ways colours are identified, described and named. The little girl's performance is like an endurance test that she conducts with intensive concentration, not once lifting her head and looking at the camera. Each light and movement becomes a research tool for the viewer: the girl who is reading and the written text. It is something that can only be grasped with eyes - colour!

Curator’s choice, Leevi Haapala

Method approaches to the moving image

Two artists from different decades set themselves up under the loupe to give performances that have a surprisingly surprising turn of events. Besides absurd situations, the works portray the method approach to working, the declaratory nature of the names of works as well as visual simplicity, and each individual event or its variations is realised according to a precise plan. The minute expressions of the actors reveal the proportion of chance in the actions of characters who are limited to portraying the upper part of the body.

In Mervi Buhl-Kytösalmi’s video 2=2+1=3, three characters contrive sequential, tightly limited situations. The artist depicts the ethical attitude in her approach to work during production: “I’ve been working at the academy for two years and my main subject is my own body in relation to time and space. I actualise different approaches and actions on videotape. Here, movement plays a key role.”

Hannu Karjalainen’s Sinipaitainen mies (Man with a blue shirt) interprets the concept of portrait painting through moving images. In an unexpected scene, the male character ends up in an unforeseen flood of paint. The artist sums up the events in his work: “Suddenly, a constant stream of thick paint starts to flow over the man. The paint gradually covers his face and stains his shirt. Finally, his face becomes unrecognisable as the paint completely smothers it. He gasps for air under the paint.”

9.5.-1.6.
Elena Näsänen, artist’s choice

6.6.-29.6.
Anu Pennanen and Ulf Lundin
Anu Pennanen, artist’s choice

4.7.-3.8.
Monique Moumblow and Elina Saloranta
Elina Saloranta, artist’s choice

8.8.-31.8.
Denise Ziegler
artist’s choice

5.9.-28.9.
Sami van Ingen
artist’s choice

10.10.-2.11.
Kari Yli-Annala
artist’s choice

7.11.-30.11. Avanto Festival
Curator’s choice: Ken Jacobs

5.12.-11.1.
Unclassifiable, Tangential Documentaries
Khaled D. Ramadan, Henrik Lund Jørgensen, Jani Ruscica, Jenny Perlin
Jenny Yurshansky and Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen
urator’s choice