Withstanding Podcast Season 1 - New Podcast Peeks Into Post-Pandemic Era

As a reaction to the inevitable standstill caused by the pandemic, institutions and individuals within the field of visual arts have had to halt production and rapidly maneuver to respond to the drastically altered situation. Institutional and independent actors alike have been forced to rethink their professional practices, as assignments, commissions, and daily work have been postponed or canceled. For many, this has made an already precarious situation even more vulnerable.

As we slowly approach a post-pandemic era, Withstanding looks into what lies ahead for the field of visual arts with curious eyes. What do we want to take with us to the future?  What to hold on to? What to leave behind? What to cultivate?

Envisioning a brighter future, Withstanding brings together art professionals from both sides of the Atlantic to share and speculate, care and criticize, and to dream of more just and sustainable conditions for artists and art practitioners at large.

Taking the form of a podcast, the series frees the listener from screens. Each podcast episode features a sound-based art work, including new commissions. The accompanying essays offer further reading and references on the topics of each episode.

Episode 4: On processes of making art public

In this episode, we discuss processes of making art public and available for audiences in the light of two versatile art organizations. Our guests are Ceci Moss, curator and founder of Gas in Los Angeles, and Paul O’Neill, curator and Artistic Director of PUBLICS in Helsinki. In the discussion, we learn about how these versatile organizations and platforms work together with artists and other art workers, as well as communities and other organizations. What kind of approaches and ethics do Gas and PUBLICS offer for the art world in helping art become public? How has the pandemic affected small non-profit art organizations? How could organizations reorganize in the verge of the post-pandemic time, to better support artists' work, and take part in practices of social justice and rebuilding of societies?

The episode features the sound piece The Flower Garden / Flower Garden Generator by art collective MSHR, formed by Birch Cooper and Brenna Murphy. The piece was originally published on the album Circular Fruiting Events, and it is one of three diptychs, each composed of a cybernetic computer music system and a spoken text describing it. In the cybernetic composition, a self-playing generative system is expressed in digital audio. The system uses feedback and randomization to produce a network of unique emergent sound events that interact to affect one another, themselves, and subsequent events. In the spoken companion text, the parameters of the system are translated into the dynamics of an imagined virtual ecosystem. The description manifests the latent sculptural aspect of the computer music system, illustrating the meshing of sonic and sculptural dimensions that form the basis of MSHR's work.

Dr. Ceci Moss is a curator, writer and educator based in Los Angeles. She is the founder of Gas, a mobile, autonomous, experimental, and networked platform for contemporary art. Her first book Expanded Internet Art: Twenty-First Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu is released through the Bloomsbury series International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics. Her writing has appeared in Rhizome, Art in America, ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum, The Wire, CURA, New Media & Society and various art catalogs. Previously, she was Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Senior Editor of the art and technology non-profit arts organization Rhizome, and Special Projects Coordinator at the New Museum. She is currently a Lecturer in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts and she has held teaching positions at University of Southern California, Scripps College, the San Francisco Art Institute and New York University.
http://www.cecimoss.com 

Dr. Paul O’Neill is an Irish curator, artist, writer and educator. He is the Artistic Director of PUBLICS, a position he took up in September 2017. PUBLICS is a curatorial agency and event space with a dedicated library, and reading room in Helsinki. Between 2013-17, he was Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) at Bard College, New York. He is author of the critically acclaimed book The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), (Cambridge, MASS., The MIT Press, 2012), which has been translated into many languages. His most recent co-edited book is Curating After the Global: Roadmaps to the Present published with MIT Press, 2019. Paul has two artist’s books with Maryam Jafri and Kathrin Bohm forthcoming in 2021-22, and is currently working on a collected anthology of Curatorial Texts called CURED.
https://www.publics.fi 

MSHR is the art collective of Birch Cooper and Brenna Murphy, established in 2011 in Portland, Oregon. The duo collaboratively builds and explores sculptural electronic systems that take form as audiovisual compositions, performances and installations. Their performances revolve around analog synthesizers and computer music systems of their own design that are played in feedback with lights and movement. Their installations involve generative and interactive electronic systems embedded in immersive sculptural arrays. MSHR's name is a modular acronym designed to hold varied ideas over time. Their practice is a self-transforming cybernetic entity with its outputs patched into its inputs, the resulting emergent form serving as its navigational system.
http://mshr.info

Episode 3: Making art in the public realm

In this episode, we discuss artistic practices focused on public spaces together with artists Chloë Bass and Mark Niskanen. Departing from Chloë Bass’ exhibition Wayfinding in NYC (2019-2020) and St. Louis (2021), and Niskanen & Salo’s installation Murmurations (2020) in NYC, we will learn about the artists’ approaches to spaces, audiences, and institutions. What can collaboration mean in an artistic process? How has the pandemic affected the artists’ work, and projects proposed by institutions? How can art institutions better support artists making work for vast audiences outside museum walls?

The episode features audio documentation of the piece Ghost Light (2020) by Mark Niskanen and Jani-Matti Salo and cultural anthropologist Inkeri Aula. Ghost Light is an installation in which observations of interconnectedness of species are shared through the undulating light on an empty theatre stage. The text of the installation has been gathered from the archives of the multinational five-year research project, SENSOTRA (Sensory Transformations and Transgenerational Environmental Relationships in Europe 1950-2020). The research has recorded sensobiographic walking interviews, in which people of different generations reflect on the changes of their living environments in the past decades. See the full video of the installation on the artists’ website.

 Further Reading

As a companion to this episode, we are delighted to share a newly commissioned essay Public art as an invitation towards abolition by Chloë Bass. In her essay, Bass reflects upon the podcast discussion with Mark Niskanen, and encourages us to imagine public art as a sphere enabling a collective system of care, based on maintaining instead of punishing. As Bass puts it, “I am suggesting that engaged stewardship is an indication that when at minimum we aren’t disrupted in the safety of our public lives and routines, and at maximum we are, perhaps, enriched and enthusiastic about the space and culture that we publicly encounter and participate in, abolition no longer seems like such a far-flung idea.”

Chloë Bass (b. 1984, New York) is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 – 2013), has recently concluded a study of pairs (The Book of Everyday Instruction, 2015 – 2017), and will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. She is currently working on Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place (2018 – 2022), an investigation of intimacy at the scale of immediate families. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent exhibits at The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Mass MoCA, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, the Knockdown Center, the Kitchen, the Brooklyn Museum, and elsewhere. https://www.chloebass.com

Mark Niskanen (b. 1991, USSR) is a multidisciplinary artist working with lens-based media, sound, music, and installations. Primarily working in collaboration with Jani-Matti Salo, the artist duo Niskanen & Salo creates installations that weave together everyday phenomena and technologies. The duo’s recent works have delved into the world of the senses, human interactions, memories, experiences of solitude and togetherness, and their associations with global themes. Their work takes the form of site-sensitive situations of personal, amorphous, and ephemeral nature. Niskanen & Salo have recently exhibited at Brooklyn Bridge Park, Helsinki Art Museum, Grand Rapids Art Museum, Mana Contemporary, Miami Art Week, and Art Quarter Budapest. Their newly commissioned video installation A Scene is currently on view at Helsinki Biennial 2021. https://www.niskanensalo.com

Episode 2: On art, ecology, and sustainable curating

In this episode, we are joined by Ama Josephine Budge and Essi Vesala to talk about ecology and contemporary art, as well as ecologically sustainable curating. What does ecologically sustainable curatorial work with contemporary art entail in today’s cultural climate? How to expand our ecological thinking when working with art, artists and exhibitions? And how to outline curatorial practices that help to shape livable futures for humans and nonhumans alike?

The episode features the sound piece I was told I chop wood like a ballet dancer (On Circles) (2020) by Freja Bäckman. The piece is part of an ongoing body of work by the artist, and it has been growing collectively since 2015 through various iterations. It has taken various forms from collective actions to one-on-one performances, a concert, performance and installation, a video piece, and most recently, a vinyl record. In this episode, we hear the B-side of I was told I chop wood like a ballet dancer (On Circles), published as a vinyl record with Coda Press in 2020. The piece plays on the origin and different meanings of the word “concert” – to contest, question, dispute (with) as well as agreement. The text on the record cites both sentences and form from Gertrude Stein's A Circular Play (1920), as well as the off-Broadway musical version In Circles (1967). The piece “steals” as a form of appreciation from a number of sources. The text is by Freja Bäckman, and the original score by Manuela Schininá. The narrator voice is Elena Schmidt, and the record is published by Scott Elliott at Coda Press.

Further Reading

As a companion to the episode, we’re publishing Essi Vesala’s essay Speculations on Ecology, Time and Action. Focusing on artistic, curatorial, and institutional practices, Vesala reflects upon the potentiality of ecological thinking in creating more sustainable futures for all species. According to them, art and curating can be fertile grounds for creating embodied knowledges, as well as finding and creating meanings and communities for ecological resilience.

Ama Josephine Budge is a Speculative Writer, Artist, Curator and Pleasure Activist whose praxis navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology, and feminism, working to activate movements that catalyze human rights, environmental evolutions, and troublesomely queered identities. Ama is the recipient of the 2020 Local, International and Planetary Fictions Fellowship with Frame Contemporary Art Finland and EVA International, and will be researching the topic Pleasurable Ecologies – Formations of Care: Curation as Future-building. Ama is also a member of Queer Ecologies 2020, initiator of the Apocalypse Reading Room project, a recipient of 2020 Bernie Grant Micro commission funding, and Lead Artist on the MycoLective project with Chisenhale Studios and Feral Practice.

Freja Bäckman works as a multidisciplinary artist, educator and researcher. Their practice is concerned with collective formations, informed by queer and intersectional feminism. Through analysis of power and knowledge sharing they work with performance, sound, text, and installation. Previously a visiting scholar at Parsons New School New York in 2020, they’re currently residing as an artist-in-residence at HIAP in Helsinki. They live in Berlin and Helsinki.

Essi Vesala is a Helsinki-based independent curator and writer, who occasionally works with film. Their practice is informed by speculative ecology and queer feminisms. Vesala’s research around ecology and curating has focused on challenging current fossil capitalist structures and creating alternative, sometimes experimental ways of working. Through their work, they aim to make space for complexity. Their most recent short film Magma, in collaboration with artist Jari Kallio, explores themes of desire, bodies, and relations in more-than-human worlds. Vesala curated a site-specific exhibition Hyper-terrestrial in Nacka forest, Stockholm, and currently is planning upcoming projects in Helsinki.

Episode 1: The Future of Residency Programs

In the pilot episode of Withstanding, we are joined by curators Taru Elfving and Kari Conte to talk about residencies and mobility. What are the most urgent questions when thinking about residencies today? How to approach mobility in the midst of an ecological crisis, and a pandemic? Which aspects of existing residency models should we aim to nourish in a post-pandemic time?

With each episode of Withstanding we will present a piece of sound art. In our first episode, you will hear Symbiogenesis (2019) by composer and sound artist Marja Ahti, originally published on her solo album Vegetal Negatives (2019). Symbiogenesis brews a slow evolution of wet, airy and earthy sounds and soft friction, juxtaposing recordings of rooms and empty vessels, natural and artificial climates, spontaneous and staged events, acoustic and electronic sources, forming associative bonds between sounds based on shared characteristics and sonic energy. The term “symbiogenesis” refers to evolutionary theory, relating to cooperation between species in order to increase their survival. Perhaps the best-known example of symbiogenesis is the Endosymbiotic Theory, popularized by evolutionary scientist Lynn Margulis, on how eukaryotic cells evolved from prokaryotic cells. Instead of competition, various prokaryotic organisms worked together to create a more stable life for all involved.

Further reading

In her essay Imagine a world without travel? Artist residencies in the future present, Taru Elfving reflects on the impacts of the pandemic, climate change, and inequality on artist residencies. The essay was commissioned by the FCINY in conjunction with the institute’s and its mobility programs’ 30th anniversary at the end of 2020.

Kari Conte’s essay Saying yes to who or what turns up, published by Goethe-Institut, focuses on the growing scene of international curatorial residencies. While various models of artist residencies have been recognized as integral parts of the global art scene, curatorial residencies providing time and space for research are still a rare find.

Taru Elfving is a Helsinki-based curator and writer, her curatorial practice focusing on the intersections of ecological and feminist thought. Elfving is currently developing a multi-disciplinary platform for artistic research in collaboration with the Archipelago Sea Research Institute of Turku University. She has published an extensive body of writing, including the publication Contemporary Artist Residencies. Reclaiming Time and Space (2019), co-edited with Irmeli Kokko.

Kari Conte is currently a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in Istanbul, researching feminist artistic practices. For the past ten years, she worked as the Director of Programs and Exhibitions at ISCP, International Studio and Curatorial program in New York. She is active as a curator, writer and lecturer, and her interests lie in the intersection of art, politics, ecology and feminism, as well as institutional and exhibition histories. She has published artist monographs, and contributed to numerous other books and exhibition catalogues, most recently the essay “Curatorial Residencies: Saying yes to who or what turns up” (2020), published by Goethe-Institut.

Marja Ahti is a Swedish-Finnish composer and sound artist based in Turku, Finland. Ahti works with field recordings and other acoustic sound material combined with synthesizers and electronic feedback, in order to find the space where these sounds start to communicate. Ahti has presented her music at various events around Europe, Japan and the United States. She is currently active in the duo Ahti & Ahti with her partner Niko-Matti Ahti, and in the collective Himera.

Withstanding is hosted by Elina Suoyrjö, FCINY’s Director of Programs.

Visuals for Withstanding are designed by Tsto / Jonatan Eriksson.

Theme & editing for Withstanding are created and produced by Retail Space, a Brooklyn-based composing duo.

Withstanding is made possible in part by the support of the New York State Council on the Arts. We are thankful for their support in bringing Withstanding to the public sphere, making conversations like these possible.