About
April 8th April 30th
Private View: April 8th, 6:30-8:30
Closing talk with Renee Carmichael and Stephen Fortune: Thursday the 28th, 6:30pm
Curated by Lisa Baldini
In an ominous room, the viewer is greeted with silence, an unassuming seat, a pair of headphones, and a mirror, alone. There are no directions -- nowhere to look -- so he/she sees the headphones and places them on his/her head. The chair is next to the mirror and with no other companion then himself/herself, the viewer peers into the mirror. So, begins the encounter with Hans Rosenström's Mikado.
Appropriating a dialogue from Ingmar Bergman's 1973 film Cries and Whispers, the goal of this new angle of dialogue is to present an encounter with personal transformation through a sound-based installation. Such an encounter is for Bruno LaTour 's Actor- network theory pre-eminent to our perception. The world is not discrete nor is it continuous it is a network that starts with the perception of the individual object, in this case the viewer, and that world is facilitated as a network via the object's perception. And yet, all of the individual nodes that comprise that perception have their own network of perceptive modes. What happens, then, in this encounter with a reflection, we find the network of perception merge as a continuous flow of contemplation enabled by the audio dialogue and dramatization of the space.
Why is self-contemplation such a revelatory cultural touch point in our media saturated times? We live in a world of networked systems defined by the objects that appear to define us. Mikado enables our perception to be one of those objects, and perhaps see how our perception finally fits within this network. An actor among actors.
Hans Rosenström's installations use narrative form to dramatize intimate relations between the work, spectator and other audience members. He holds an MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and has received various grants and scholarships through his career including: a one year working grant from The Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland and Finnish Cultural Foundation, residencies at Iaspis in Stockholm and Platform Garanti in Istanbul. He has exhibited in Amos Anderson Art Museum, The Kuulvi Gallery, Gallery Kalhama Piippo Contemporary, the Mänttä Art Festival, the Biennale of Young Artists in Tallin, Estonia, and Mobile Art Production in Stockholm and Göteborg, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Rosenström lives and works in Helsinki and Stockholm.
