Laura Horelli Returns
11 Jul - 07 Sep 2014
Opening: Thursday, 10 July, 7 pm
Presented in the atrium of Badischer Kunstverein, Returns brings together four works by Finnish artist Laura Horelli (*1976). Though Horelli works chiefly with video, she also uses photography and text. Her works revolve around the subjects of identity, representation, and memory. The starting point is her interest in historical contexts, whose alleged facticity she deliberately undermines.
In her most recent video works, presented as a trilogy in the exhibition, Horelli takes autobiography as her subject, but repeatedly embeds it within a larger social and political context. A central moment is the early loss of her mother, who died in 1987 when Horelli was ten years old, and whose absence she approaches using various filmic techniques.
In Haukka-Pala (A-Bit-to-Bite, 2009) one sees Horelli’s mother appearing in a popular children’s programme on Finnish state television in the 1980s. In the episode, she gives the dog puppet Ransu tips on healthy nutrition. The TV footage is interleaved with a voice-over by the artist, who contrasts the staged television appearance with her own memories and excerpts from her mother’s diaries.
The Terrace (2011) deals with Horelli’s childhood memories in Nairobi, Kenya, where she lived with her family in a modernist residential complex for four years. Old family photographs taken by Horelli’s mother are combined with the artist’s own film sequences. Only through the artist’s descriptions and commentaries in the voice-over does it become possible to understand life in the compound as a postcolonial story.
In her video A Letter to Mother (2013), the artist structures her story using footage shot in Flushing, Queens, New York. The work is a search for traces of her mother, but also of her grandparents, who emigrated from Finland to Brasilia and then to the United States after the Second World War. Against the background of the McCarthy era and the Cold War, the artist asks herself why the family emigrated and why this was so seldom discussed. The interplay of personal memories, anecdotes, conjectures and a fictive letter to her mother points out how closely the private and political are linked.
The story of the emigration of Finns to the United States is also a central subject in Horelli’s installation The Yokinen Trial (2014), which will be shown for the first time at Badischer Kunstverein. The photographs and texts presented are taken from Horelli’s research into the life of August Jokinen, a Finnish communist who immigrated to the United States in 1916 and was accused of racism in a show trial in 1931. Here too, Horelli is less interested in revealing a consistent identity than in utilising texts and images to keep her narration deliberately complex and to maintain numerous potential readings. This practice of “broadening” is precisely what allows ideas to become visible ideas which would otherwise remain concealed behind a purported reality.
Laura Horelli (b. 1976 in Helsinki, Finland) lives and works in Berlin.
She studied fine arts at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki (Department of Time and Space) and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt (class of Thomas Bayrle).
Presented in the atrium of Badischer Kunstverein, Returns brings together four works by Finnish artist Laura Horelli (*1976). Though Horelli works chiefly with video, she also uses photography and text. Her works revolve around the subjects of identity, representation, and memory. The starting point is her interest in historical contexts, whose alleged facticity she deliberately undermines.
In her most recent video works, presented as a trilogy in the exhibition, Horelli takes autobiography as her subject, but repeatedly embeds it within a larger social and political context. A central moment is the early loss of her mother, who died in 1987 when Horelli was ten years old, and whose absence she approaches using various filmic techniques.
In Haukka-Pala (A-Bit-to-Bite, 2009) one sees Horelli’s mother appearing in a popular children’s programme on Finnish state television in the 1980s. In the episode, she gives the dog puppet Ransu tips on healthy nutrition. The TV footage is interleaved with a voice-over by the artist, who contrasts the staged television appearance with her own memories and excerpts from her mother’s diaries.
The Terrace (2011) deals with Horelli’s childhood memories in Nairobi, Kenya, where she lived with her family in a modernist residential complex for four years. Old family photographs taken by Horelli’s mother are combined with the artist’s own film sequences. Only through the artist’s descriptions and commentaries in the voice-over does it become possible to understand life in the compound as a postcolonial story.
In her video A Letter to Mother (2013), the artist structures her story using footage shot in Flushing, Queens, New York. The work is a search for traces of her mother, but also of her grandparents, who emigrated from Finland to Brasilia and then to the United States after the Second World War. Against the background of the McCarthy era and the Cold War, the artist asks herself why the family emigrated and why this was so seldom discussed. The interplay of personal memories, anecdotes, conjectures and a fictive letter to her mother points out how closely the private and political are linked.
The story of the emigration of Finns to the United States is also a central subject in Horelli’s installation The Yokinen Trial (2014), which will be shown for the first time at Badischer Kunstverein. The photographs and texts presented are taken from Horelli’s research into the life of August Jokinen, a Finnish communist who immigrated to the United States in 1916 and was accused of racism in a show trial in 1931. Here too, Horelli is less interested in revealing a consistent identity than in utilising texts and images to keep her narration deliberately complex and to maintain numerous potential readings. This practice of “broadening” is precisely what allows ideas to become visible ideas which would otherwise remain concealed behind a purported reality.
Laura Horelli (b. 1976 in Helsinki, Finland) lives and works in Berlin.
She studied fine arts at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki (Department of Time and Space) and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt (class of Thomas Bayrle).