tiistai 23. maaliskuuta 2010

ARTIST INTERVIEW / Hertta Kiiski



Name: Hertta Kiiski

Age: 36

Lives in: Turku, Finland

I Work: nearly always when not in school or playing with the daughters

I think I will grow up to be: a photographer

Things I like: pastéis de nata, diamonds, wool, Monica Fagerholm, old seaside villas, family and friends

Things I dislike: routines

The soundtrack to this exhibition is: Childhood by Beach House & Cemetary Party by Air


What makes Heartta Kiiski panic?



Just about anything. Horror films, of course, but also swimming pools, which are built underground, bubble arenas, sewers, birds, stuffed animals, sleep walking children.






How did you decide to work with images of terror?



There are so many movies that I would like to see, but I know that I can not watch them without being traumatized. For example, Lars von Trier's “Antichrist” attracts me constantly, but I know that I would never get those images out of my head. I saw ”The Shining” by Stanley Kubrick about fifteen years ago, and the bloody hotel room walls and twins in the end of the corridor are still troubling me.



I am interested with the appeal of horror, such as how small details can create a sense of horror. These pictures were born of the memories created by popular culture. Images with something familiar and something indefinable.







An infant, hair, or winding bush mycelium in themselves are not anything terribly horrible. Which photographic methods create horror effects?



I wanted to make images of things that in themselves are not anything awful or scary. I create a framework for these stories in everyday places. The most horrifying is never what we see, but what we don't see. Each story creates its own frightening image in the viewer's mind.





What kind of horror pictures are you drawn to? Why do we seek to see images that are appalling and disgusting?


Louise Bourgeois' spiders, Hieronymus Bosch and Caspar David Friedrich's works have something hypnotic in them. Petros Chrisostomou's photos and Jake & Dinos Chapman's figures give me shivers. Hair and things magnified to an unrealistically large scale always resonate! 

Beauty quickly becomes boring, but horrors interest tends to be longer. And I guess it works as a cathartic purifying effect.






The images of your Horreur exhibition have a kind of serenity and cool aesthetics despite the frightening atmosphere. Can you find beauty in the most extreme splatter images?



Sure, say, Kill Bill is a visually spectacular! But the bloody guts as such do not scare me or touch. Quiet psychological horror is more the unattainable target of my passion. The deranged beauty that has a story to tell.

Interview: Verna Kuutti
Translation: Edna Nelson

perjantai 19. maaliskuuta 2010

Frank Koolen: United Colors of + Faund #5 Dogs


Dutch artist Frank Koolen's book United Colors of. Designed by Bart de Baets.
www.frankkoolen.com



Faund #5 Dogs, A catalogue of 1000 dog images found on the internet by multiple finders. Only 100 copies edition.
www.faund.net/post/248281815/faunddogs

maanantai 8. maaliskuuta 2010

Heidrun Holzfeind: Mexico 68/CU




The two-volume book combines two closely related art projects by Heidrun Holzfeind:

Mexico 68 investigates the impact of the ’68 student movement on Mexican society, politics and culture in general, and on the lives of the participants in particular. Conducted almost forty years after the fact, the 18 interviews with activists offer a diverse range of personal accounts, political and social analysis as well as reflections on the events that took place during that mythic year.

CU, Mexico City, August 2006 is a personal portrait of “Ciudad Universitaria”, the National University’s Mexico City campus. The carefully composed shots of exterior and interior views, architectural details, and eerily unpopulated hallways, class rooms and walkways highlight Holzfeind’s interest in aging modernist structures, the conceptualization of the campus as a modern “city” and the use of functionality in the Mexican modernization project.

www.mexico68.net

keskiviikko 3. maaliskuuta 2010

We have the card machine!


Finally we take Visa, Mastercard, Electron, all of them! Thanks Edna for posing.

der:die:das:




der:die:das:
is a brandnew monothematic magazine made in Zurich,
which examines items, objects and various „things“ from everyday life,
trying to get to the bottom of their meaning to newly orchestrate them.
Next to their meaning in everyday life the items will be put in an art- and
design-discourse, in order to reveal the bizzare and the established all at once.
www.derdiedas-magazin.com