Jukka Korkeila - Marcus Eek - Birgir Snæbjörn Birgisson
07 Oct - 06 Nov 2011
JUKKA KORKEILA - MARCUS EEK - BIRGIR SNÆBJÖRN BIRGISSON
The Pleasure Principle
7 October - 6 November, 2011
A Nordic group exhibition on Contemporary Painting
by: Mika Hannula
Artists: Birgir Birgisson (Iceland), Marcus Eek (Sweden), Jukka Korkeila (Finland)
Curator: Mika Hannula (Finland)
Two Sites:
- Kling & Bang Gallery, Reykjavik, October 2011
- Roger Björkholmen Gallery, Stockholm, December/January 2011/2012
The idea is to organize and conduct a two part, tightly interwoven group exhibition that focuses on the chances and challenges of contemporary painting. This is painting as a critical and self-reflexive practice that is aware where it is coming from and wide awake of the potentialities of actualizing painting right here, and right now. It is the shift from what something is, and moving into the experimental terrain of how both individual paintings and a group exhibition is organized and done.
The exhibition will be organized in two locations, and in gallery spaces. The aim is to conduct a group exhibition that is a combination of individual works with acts and actions made on site by the participants, reacting and sparring each other’s works and ways of working. The structure of the project is divided into two shows, with each a distinct focus.
1. exhibition: Inside-In – the Body
2. exhibition: Outside-Out – the Landscape
The first exhibition is framed by personal and private perspective. It is about the identity of the artist and the identity of a painting. It short, it is about the body (as in the matters that matter), how it is formed transformed, translated and transmitted. This leads into the questions of what makes a painting a good painting, asking directly about the quality and context of a work of art. Consequently, this part will ask: how can a painting be physically and mentally present at a site?
What’s more: how can it make and shape a site into something singular?
The second part of the whole project turns the attention and motivation from private into the common and the general. This is to focus on what is common to us, framing this into the question of the collective ways of being and working, addressing this especially with the aim of re-thinking what is a landscape as an example of collective memory and part of our social imagination. It is not landscape as a picture of something that is out there, but it is landscape as a symbolic and metaphorical means of activating who we are and how we are, where we find us or would want to find us.
The rules of the project: For each exhibition, every artist produces 4-6 new works. During the installation process, the artists will collaborate and react to the site and the works, creating site-specific works that make the project into something much more than just a simple sum of its parts. Thus, making the whole event into something special, into something that is called The Pleasure Principle. Let us, for good measure and very good reasons, repeat it: The Pleasure Principle.
The two mottos that carry the weight and turn the day into a night (and back again):
Part 1: Feeling for, and feeling with what is a painting as a possibility.
Part 2: The soundtrack of the project is the lyrics of the song I Will Survive, originally performed by Gloria Gaynor in 1978. In the spirit embodied into that magnificent line from that song: “As long as I know how to love, I know I will stay alive ...”
The Pleasure Principle
7 October - 6 November, 2011
A Nordic group exhibition on Contemporary Painting
by: Mika Hannula
Artists: Birgir Birgisson (Iceland), Marcus Eek (Sweden), Jukka Korkeila (Finland)
Curator: Mika Hannula (Finland)
Two Sites:
- Kling & Bang Gallery, Reykjavik, October 2011
- Roger Björkholmen Gallery, Stockholm, December/January 2011/2012
The idea is to organize and conduct a two part, tightly interwoven group exhibition that focuses on the chances and challenges of contemporary painting. This is painting as a critical and self-reflexive practice that is aware where it is coming from and wide awake of the potentialities of actualizing painting right here, and right now. It is the shift from what something is, and moving into the experimental terrain of how both individual paintings and a group exhibition is organized and done.
The exhibition will be organized in two locations, and in gallery spaces. The aim is to conduct a group exhibition that is a combination of individual works with acts and actions made on site by the participants, reacting and sparring each other’s works and ways of working. The structure of the project is divided into two shows, with each a distinct focus.
1. exhibition: Inside-In – the Body
2. exhibition: Outside-Out – the Landscape
The first exhibition is framed by personal and private perspective. It is about the identity of the artist and the identity of a painting. It short, it is about the body (as in the matters that matter), how it is formed transformed, translated and transmitted. This leads into the questions of what makes a painting a good painting, asking directly about the quality and context of a work of art. Consequently, this part will ask: how can a painting be physically and mentally present at a site?
What’s more: how can it make and shape a site into something singular?
The second part of the whole project turns the attention and motivation from private into the common and the general. This is to focus on what is common to us, framing this into the question of the collective ways of being and working, addressing this especially with the aim of re-thinking what is a landscape as an example of collective memory and part of our social imagination. It is not landscape as a picture of something that is out there, but it is landscape as a symbolic and metaphorical means of activating who we are and how we are, where we find us or would want to find us.
The rules of the project: For each exhibition, every artist produces 4-6 new works. During the installation process, the artists will collaborate and react to the site and the works, creating site-specific works that make the project into something much more than just a simple sum of its parts. Thus, making the whole event into something special, into something that is called The Pleasure Principle. Let us, for good measure and very good reasons, repeat it: The Pleasure Principle.
The two mottos that carry the weight and turn the day into a night (and back again):
Part 1: Feeling for, and feeling with what is a painting as a possibility.
Part 2: The soundtrack of the project is the lyrics of the song I Will Survive, originally performed by Gloria Gaynor in 1978. In the spirit embodied into that magnificent line from that song: “As long as I know how to love, I know I will stay alive ...”