2017 JUN–AUG
Henna-Riikka Halonen
Visual artist Henna-Riikka Halonen is FCINY’s and Triangle Art Association’s artist-in-residency in June – August 2017. Halonen works in a range of media, including video, photography, drawing and installation. She graduated with a MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, London in 2006, and is currently doing her doctoral studies at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts.
Halonen uses a great variety of historical and cultural references in her work, including Avant-Garde theatre, science fiction literature and cinema. The works are often responses to a specific context or a site, aiming to highlight our need to structure experiences as fictions in order to gain understanding of them.
Halonen’s recent projects and research explore how social relations and spaces are conditioned by political and technological developments, addressing the gap between the experience and the explanation. She is particularly interested in the moments of collapse and friction, in which one comes to face with the limits of either space or language. Her films, performances, texts and installations aim to open up a space to re-imagine and re-experience the world we inhabit. By creating worlds within worlds or systems within systems, Halonen explores our relationship to objects and words and to other living beings, in a world where ongoing transformation from material to virtual and body to image are taking place.
The goal of Halonen's work and research during her residency is to question or propose alternatives to dominant technological systems or behaviors. The project she is currently working on considers other living and non-living beings as collaborators in making work, interfering into man made systems, spaces and times, for example computerized economic systems.