In Residence 2010-2020

This year, the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York is celebrating thirty years of hosting residency and mobility programs in New York City. In this article, we meet three of our alumni, artist Terike Haapoja, curator Amanda Schmitt, and artist Riitta Ikonen, as they share their residency recollections from the preceding decade.

Over the course of the 2010’s, the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York expanded and developed their residency programs and collaborations. During the last years, the FCINY has collaborated with New York-based International Studio and Curatorial Program ISCP and Triangle Arts Association in residency programs offering three to six month long residencies and studio spaces in Williamsburg and Dumbo. In 2014, FCINY launched together with the Finnish Institute in London a new mobility program, the MOBIUS Fellowship Program (2014-2020), which enabled transatlantic mobility and collaborative practices for visual arts, museum, and archive professionals.

In this final article reflecting on our residency programs over the years, we talk to artist Terike Haapoja of her residency with ISCP and the importance of making new friends through international collaboration. We discuss the MOBIUS Fellowship Program and the opportunities the fellowship created with curator Amanda Schmitt. Artist Riitta Ikonen talks about her ongoing residency with Triangle Arts Association in Dumbo and the manifold of interactions the residency has enabled. We conclude the article by wrapping up the thirty year long retrospect of our residency programs. Follow along!

Riitta Ikonen — Collaboration and reveries as a survival strategy

Riitta Ikonen is an artist working in the intersections of performance, photography, sculpture, video, and mail art. Guided by curiosity and reveries, Ikonen seeks to understand our relationship with the surrounding environment, preferably through collaborating with people and vegetation. From the village Kelvä in Eastern Finland to Rockaway Beach in Queens, Ikonen’s restless feet have led them across the world. While routinely travelling six months each year lecturing, exhibiting, and performing with various collaborators, Ikonen has found a home in the city of New York.

Since September this year, Ikonen has held the position of an artist-in-residence with Triangle Arts Association in Dumbo, Brooklyn. The residency is part of the Finnish Cultural Foundation’s collaboration with international residency programs. FCINY has collaborated in a shared residency program with Triangle Arts Association in Dumbo since 2014. In 2020, the residency program has been specifically tailored to a US-based Finnish artist due to the travel restrictions caused by COVID-19. 

The most memorable experiences of Ikonen’s residency have taken place in interactions  — COVID-safe studio visits and Virtual Open Studios events have allowed formative discussions that have given Ikonen new insights and perspectives on her work. Commuting daily to the studio in Dumbo has also proven to be a valuable time for Ikonen to connect and circulate ideas:

“The residency has given me the great opportunity to meet people and to use my studio commute as a form of hometown travel, because normally I don’t have a studio - I work in the forest, in Senegal, in Greenland, in Norway, it could be anywhere. Now I have a studio to go to and it gives me the perfect excuse for interesting interactions.”

At the studio in Dumbo, Ikonen is completing the work for the new Eyes as Big as Plates 2. Eyes as Big as Plates is an ongoing collaborative project between Riitta Ikonen and Norwegian photographer Karoline Hjorth. Centered around understanding modern human’s belonging to nature, the project is produced in collaboration with seniors — retired farmers, Sami reindeer herders, kantele players, plumbers, housewives, and ninety year old parachutists — and the environment in which they live.

Eyes as Big as Plates Vol 2 will consist of 50 new photographic works and field notes made over the last four years in South Korea, Tasmania, Outer Hebrides, Senegal, Iceland, Greenland, and Norway. As a crowning stroke, the new publication’s cover experiment's consist of a tactile twist: mushrooms. According to Ikonen, publishing a book is a perfect opportunity to advocate for alternative biopolymers:

“We want to try to incorporate fungi in this volume because they are technically immortal. They are connectors between the dead and the living. Working with older people, working with nature, working with the blurring of boundaries between people, nature, age, gender, country borders, all of this. We thought fungi would be an excellent personification of what we initiate in Eyes as Big as Plates, all of the elements.”

At the studio in Dumbo, Ikonen has explored making mushroom paper. The key to the process lies in chitin, the primary component of cell walls in mushrooms that is comparable to the structure of cellulose. Although the scent of the mushroom pulp has turned to be at times mildly intoxicating, the quest for soft and malleable mushroom paper continues. Eyes as Big as Plates 2 will comprise 3,000 unique copies. The book is planned to be launched next Spring 2021 upon the project's 10th anniversary.

Amanda Schmitt — Tracing the Mobius strip

Amanda Schmitt is a curator, writer, and gallerist based in New York. Schmitt’s curatorial endeavours are focused on video, performance, installation, and sound art. Schmitt is currently director of kaufmann repetto, New York, and creator and host of the UNTITLED, ART Podcast.

In 2018, Schmitt was invited to participate in the MOBIUS Fellowship Program. Launched in 2014 by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York and the Finnish Institute in London, MOBIUS Fellowship Program facilitated working periods for visual arts, museum, and archive professionals. Concluded in January 2020, the fellowship program enabled transatlantic mobility and collaborative practices that sought to support long-lasting professional relationships. The collaborative and cybernetic quality of the fellowship program resonated with Schmitt:

“One of the things that I was most attracted to was the name — MOBIUS. The concept of the Mobius strip, the idea of the end being the beginning and the beginning being the end, the outside being the inside and the inside being the outside.”

Leading to Schmitt participating in the MOBIUS Fellowship, Schmitt had been looking for opportunities to do further research into the American video art pioneer and media theorist Paul Ryan who wrote extensively about the Mobius strip and its relation to analogue video tape. To conduct a MOBIUS Fellowship, while making research into the Mobius strip and the work of Paul Ryan, sounded ideal for Schmitt.

As part of the MOBIUS Fellowship, Schmitt travelled to Helsinki in the winter 2018 for a two-month long residency. Schmitt’s intended purpose of her visit was to spend time doing research on Paul Ryan’s book Cybernetics of the Sacred (1973) and to explore an exhibition thesis that she had developed, entitled “Video Wake”. In Helsinki, Schmitt was introduced to the Finnish experimental filmmaker and video artist Mika Taanila. To their shared surprise, Schmitt and Taanila found common ground in their in depth knowledge of Paul Ryan. Additionally, Mika Taanila introduced Schmitt to the Finnish multimedia artist, philosopher, and designer Erkki Kurenniemi whose work and thoughts made a profound impression on Schmitt. 

To conclude Schmitt’s research and visit in Helsinki, Schmitt organized a public lecture and screening with the National Audiovisual Institute (KAVI). The lecture and film screening presented two video works: Verbranntes Land (2002) by Mika Taanila and Video Wake for My Father (1971) by Paul Ryan. The lecture and screening at KAVI, as well as her time meeting with artists, writers, and curators in the Helsinki area, brought new insights and launched a line of research that ultimately led to the Future Delay exhibition at Helsinki Contemporary in June, 2019.

Future Delay featured three new site-specific commissions by three contemporary artists — Madeline Hollander (US), Pearla Pigao (NO), and Hans Rosenström (FIN). The artists’ works explored themes of cybernetic communication and choreographies between human and machine, as well as technological immortality. The exhibition leaned on the media theories by Paul Ryan and Erkki Kurenniemi. Future Delay was realised in collaboration with HIAP - Helsinki International Artist Programme and Zodiak - Center for New Dance. The support provided by the MOBIUS Fellowship allowed Schmitt to work in close dialogue with all of the three artists for 18 months prior to the exhibition, an opportunity that was incredibly rewarding for both the curator and the artists.

Future Delay did not finalize Schmitt’s interest in exploring the shared sensibilities between Paul Ryan and Erkki Kurenniemi. In Autumn 2019, Schmitt organized Feedback to the Future, a film screening presenting Paul Ryan’s video work Video Wake for My Father (1971) and clips from the Erkki Kurenniemi archive. The screening took place at the Anthology Film Archive in New York and was followed by a conversation with historian Ina Blom, and curator Giampaolo Bianconi. Resurrecting these video works was a dream for Schmitt.

Two years after Schmitt’s first visit to Helsinki, the never-ending cycle embodied in the Mobius strip continues. This year, Schmitt curated The Memory Differential, an online exhibition presenting a selection of video works highlighting how technologies capture, record, and transcribe memory. The exhibition focuses on a video work by Polish and Finland-based artist Monika Czyzyk, an artist Schmitt met during her first visit in Helsinki in 2018. It goes without saying; the beginning is the end is the beginning.

Terike Haapoja — Cultivating friendships and coexistence

Terike Haapoja is a visual artist based in New York City. Haapoja’s large scale installation work, writing, and projects investigate the existential and political boundaries of a world that is deeply rooted in the physicality and coexistence of beings and their multiple lifeworlds. Since 2012, Haapoja has collaborated with writer Laura Gustafsson in a long term project exploring problems that arise from an anthropocentric worldview while elaborating on ethical and utopian ways to coexist. In New York City, Haapoja works as an adjunct professor at Parsons Fine Arts and NYU. Since 2019, Haapoja has served on the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York’s Board of Directors as representative of The Artists' Association of Finland.

In 2013, Haapoja represented Finland in the 55. Venice Biennale with a solo show in the Nordic Pavilion. After the extensive exhibition at the Venice Biennale, Haapoja felt the desire to see new landscapes and to find more perspectives on artistic work. Haapoja applied for a residency with ISCP - International Studio and Curatorial Program in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The residency with ISCP sounded like an interesting opportunity to familiarize with a new place, and to see one’s artistic practice through a new context.

Since 2012, FCINY has collaborated with ISCP in a residency catered to meet the needs of Finnish or Finland-based artists. Supported by Alfred Kordelin Foundation, the residency runs for six months and allows the artists a concentrated period of work by granting them a studio space at ISCP, an apartment in Williamsburg, as well as a grant for material expenses. Starting 2015, ISCP has hosted residencies for alumni of the Academy of Fine Arts in Finland, funded by Saastamoinen Foundation.

At the residency with ISCP, Haapoja took time to settle down, look around, and to slowly start new projects. Besides working in the studio, the residency gave space and time for building relationships and connections to the field of arts and culture: 

“The scene that I became connected with in New York City was a political art scene where the discussions relating to economy, institutional critique, and racism felt alive, interesting, and important. Within the scene, I found co-thinkers with whom I could discuss central themes related to the environment and the climate crisis.”

After the ISCP residency, Haapoja wanted to continue the newly formed relationships and dialogues. Haapoja traveled back to New York City during the preceding year before deciding to move to the city in the autumn of 2015.

A year after, Haapoja participated in a lecture by new media artist Rian Hammond at the 2016 Creative Time Summit. Haapoja and Hammond stayed in contact after the summit and began discussing a joint venture connecting their interests in challenging normative binaries of the Western culture. The outcome, Beyond Binaries: Towards New Constructs of Personhood and Gender symposium, approached the challenge of deconstructing binary gender and the human-animal divide.

The first session of the symposium focused on the politics of gender through the practices of Rian Hammond and political theorist Heath Fogg Davis. The second session addressed the notion of humanity and animality through presentations by Terike Haapoja and researcher and author Syl Ko. The symposium, organized in collaboration with ISCP and FCINY in 2018, was well received, initiating plentiful discussions among the audience and the symposium speakers. Furthermore, the symposium strengthened the relationships between the participating speakers and collaborators with whom Haapoja is still in dialogue, now as good friends. 

What has become apparent for Haapoja over the years is the value of friendships in building resilient international collaborations. The premise for working internationally can’t be based on the opportunistic thought and question how do I benefit from this?. International collaboration should derive from a genuine desire to be and think together, and to give each other opportunities.

Epilogue

We have journeyed a long way from the inaugural year 1990 when the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York launched its residency program in New York City. The first 1990’s residency experiences, outlined in In Residence 1990-1999, were influenced by a sheer excitement of being able to travel to New York City from a remotely located country in the North, especially after financially difficult years marked by the early 1990’s depression. As travel between the U.S. and Finland became increasingly more accessible during the 2000’s, the purpose of a residency period in New York City shifted towards developing artistic and academic ambitions through gallery representations, exhibitions, and research in the city. These residency experiences are presented in In Residence 2000-2010. As a continuation to affordable travel alongside growing digitalization, political unrest, and environmental concern, the 2010’s residency recollections found justification and value in personal and physical interactions, collaborations, and friendships enabled via the residency programs.

As we proceed to a new decade with complex and urgent challenges — a global pandemic, rising inequality, injustice, racism, and climate emergency — the modus operandi of residency programs needs to be fearlessly rethought, reimagined, and readjusted to the new, and yet unknown, present and future. In the article Imagine a world without travel? Artist residencies in the future present curator, writer and researcher Taru Elfving writes about the effect of the current halt in international travel, while reflecting on how to imagine the future of artist residencies. Elfving calls for collective, embodied, multisensory, imaginative, experimental and immersive inquiries in the face of the many unknowns facing residency programs today.

Text by Vilma Leminen