19.11.2021

The first exhibitions of the year 2021 have been announced

The second year of the Kunsthalle Seinäjoki at the new art and culture center Kalevan Navetta opens up with the first solo show in the exhibition space Halli. Calix by Seinäjoki artist Päivi Rintaniemi presents the newest works of the acclaimed visual artist and designer. The simple, fragile yet stabile form of Rintaniemi’s sculptures give audience the possibility to focus on the simple, physical surface and arrested movement. Clay, often considered a modest material, has a strong character. Over the decades thousands of objects, sculptures, surfaces and forms have been molded in Rintaniemi’s hands. Calix is the first solo exhibition in the Halli and shows a whole new side to the space: the rough Halli offers an interesting background for the sculptures. The artist processes life’s peculiarities, tragedies and joys. She was granted the State Design Prize in 2008 and has been running her own design studio Amfora in Seinäjoki, producing hand-made table wear and design. She has also comissioned art works in Finland and abroad. In her home town she created the beloved concrete sculpture Big Hug in 2016 to the new Pruukinranta residental area. Calix is open from Feb 3rd to May 29th 2021.

Prometheuksen kanto: Pysykää yhdessä (Stump of Prometheus: Stay together) by Jaana Maijala and Ville Linna is a part of the artists’ project that started in 2018. It documents endangered and historically significant old trees photographing and recording them. Recordings are made with a self-built bioacustic indicator that transforms the electric current in the trees to sound audible to human ear. The first part of the project was exhibited at the Lapua Art Museum in the Fall 2020. To Vintti, Maijala and Linna create an installation that explores plant biology and its’ possibilities to produce sound and image. How does human kind interpret the information produced by the plants? The devices by Ville Linna pick up information from the plants and tranfer it in the instruments in the exhibition space. Jaana Maijala explores the biological boundaries of visual art and the works surround the space and sound. Together the elements in the exhibition create an entity where the spectator can observe the upcoming spring.The exhibition is open from March 31st to May 29th 2021.

In the summer, Vintti is taken over by five Finnish young and rising contemporary artists with the PISTO (”STITCH”) exhibition. The Kunsthalle Seinäjoki program team has curated en exhibition with young artists who all use textile as technique and material in their articic practice. The artists also share a playful and on the other hand an editorialised attitude , as well as the adaptive use of a traditional technique. The exhibition is in dialogue with the space: The building Kalevan Navetta, nowadays the art and culture centre, functioned as a baize factory in 1909 – 1929. After that the building served as a warehouse for the Finnish Military Forces for decades, but now in 2020s it’s home for soft materials, as the local crafts centre is one of the organizations inhabiting it. The artists in the exhibition are Anni Haunia, Erika Hirsimäki, Ilai Elias Lehto, Ninni Luhtasaari and Anna Vainio. The exhibition is open from June 16th to August 21st 2021.

In the Halli, Norwegian artist Anne Katrine Senstad’s immersive light sculpture environment is an invitation to encounter a perceptual and sensorial taxonomy of light and sound in pure form. In Radical Light Senstad examines the transformational potentials of experiential space and ethereal topologies. The installation is accompanied by a 38-minute looped sound composition by acclaimed composer JG Thirlwell, enveloping the vast light sculptural matrices and the sensory chamber in a unifying sensation of vastness with electric impulses of spatial noise and poetic grandeur. Norwegian artist Anne Senstad was educated at Parsons School of Design and The New School for Social Research in New York. Senstad’s practice lies in the multi-disciplinary intersections of installation art, photography, video, neon sculpture, immersive installation, land art and site specificity, with a focus on the phenomena of perception and the cognitive system in response to the properties of light, sound, and color, as well as her hybridized critical and poetic text-based works on dialectics, literature, language, and philosophy through the use of signage and commercial materials and commodities. Her video work has been shown at Centre Pompidou in Paris, Haus Der Kultur Der Welt, Berlin, and Beirut Art Center as well as in other art museums and exhibition spaces internationally. Her work is represented in gallery, institutional, corporate, and private collections.

The exhibition is produced with Kai Art Centre in Tallinn, Estonia. The exhibition is supported by the Finnish Art Promotion Centre.