installation: ceramic objects, pigment and wood

One of the starting points of In Between was an examination of monochromatism or the use of a single colour. The deep red colour of the lobby ceiling in Bio Rex inspired the artist to experiment with how this challenging hue, capable of evoking strong feelings, would react when brought into a completely different environment. Besides pigments, Kuitunen is also curious about form and material, moving freely across art and design. Even the slightest interference with familiar elements can lead us onto completely new paths. The font used in Bio Rex is a form that was chosen by someone in the 1930s. When it is distorted, its semantic content changes, or disappears altogether.

The iconic elements of the Bio Rex lobby have been relocated into a modern underground exhibition hall, where they spread like a virus or mushroom spawn, reprogramming the space. Letters from cinema signs melt and collapse on an alien platform. The red pigment leaks along the surfaces, causing unpredictable waves on the floor, amid which the nearly unrecognisable letters perform a strange, slow choreography. Observing this work, the viewer may find an opportunity to head toward parallel aesthetics and alternative ways of seeing.

installation: glass sculptures, ceramic candle, glazed ceramic pillow, round pedestals

Glass buoys stand atop outsized, extended pedestals. A ceramic candle, attached to one buoy, has been burnt at both ends, with black flames or smoke appearing to rise from the other buoy. Resting on a lower pedestal is a handmade ceramic pillow, upon which a gilt match has been placed.

In his installation Artefacts of Disharmony, Tero Kuitunen plays with traditional ways of exhibiting in museums as well as material and formal language. He expands, distorts and refines handmade objects and their impossibly proportioned pedestals in a kind of ritualised reference to greed, stress and our disproportionately lavish lifestyle. Whereas Renaissance princes and scholars collected strange objects from nature and art for their cabinets of curiosities, Kuitunen presents odd yet familiar everyday objects shown in a new light through their materials.

These valuable objects carry on their own strange discussion at the intersection of fire, the sea and the museum, causing busy passers-by to contemplate the environmentally harmful ideals of today’s culture of consumption.

"We created our own independent entities for the exhibition but the interaction between us and the discussion of the works were essential parts of the process – in that way, too, the title of the exhibition Between us is very descriptive. When we saw our space for the exhibition for the first time, we all knew instinctively where in the space we would place our works and the harmony between them came into being as if by itself”.

pictures: Sofia Okkonen / Amos Rex