Hou Hanru (CN):
It was a great honour for me to be invited to be the “expert” for Ars Fennica 2008. And it’s really a great pleasure to meet with the shortlisted artists from Finland and Baltic countries and discover their work in a close and deep manner. This has not only provided me a chance to approach individual artists who have manifested remarkable energy and creativity in the particular locales facing some major global challenges and come up with original answers through their highly personal and diverse languages nurtured by both personal experiences and commitments to the contemporary world in transition. What is equally important is, taking up the opportunity to visit the exhibition, the candidates’ works and the related geographic and cultural contexts, the task of “judging” for Ars Fennica 2008 has been an immense experience for me to explore and understand more profoundly how really engaged artistic activities, with the support of the sponsors and larger public, can bring new meanings to the social and cultural life to various local lives in the time of global transformation.
A highly interesting and significant geo-political and geo-cultural mutation is now happening in this part of the world. New dialogues, reunions and collaborations are being created amongst the Baltic nations and cultures. This energetic process is rapidly redesigning a new landscape of the regional artistic and cultural worlds after half a century of interruption and two decades of dramatic reconstruction. This new landscape, obviously, is forming a unique and meaningful part of the global art and culture evolving towards a spectacle of diversity and multitude. This year, thanks to the selection committee’s insights and efforts, we have a shortlist of candidates for Ars Fennica from both Finland and other Baltic countries. And this reflects perfectly such a meaning new tendency and shows an exemplary endeavour to create a fresh local force to enrich the global scene.
The five candidates, Maria Duncker, Tea Mäkipää, Seppo Renvall from Finland, Katrina Neiburga from Latvia and Mark Raidpere from Estonia, in their multimedia works including sculpture, video, installation, performance, etc., have shown some remarkably intense and powerful individual achievements in their engagements, negotiations and innovations vis-à-vis a large range of critical challenges of today’s reality: geopolitical transformation and its impacts on personal life and memory, new urban life and its influences on social relationship, the culture of image and digital communication as new conditions of life, environmental crisis and the future of the planet, etc. All the artists, in their long term carriers and site-specific installations in the finalists exhibition, have all manifested their great talents and capacities to transmit their critical, imaginative and often poetic interpretations of this defying world. What is absolutely impressive is to discover how they resorts to extremely different but equally effective strategies to negotiate with the exhibition spaces and hence enhance and reinforce their individual expressions. The commonly high qualities of their very diverse works along with their intelligent, relevant textual and verbal explanations of their concepts and intellectual motivations, indeed, have made the job of selecting only ONE winner of the prize particularly difficult.
But, in spite of the “pain” to deal with such a “mission impossible”, a winner has to be selected. And this time, after careful and serious reflections, I accomplish my duty to make the decision: the “winner” is Mark Raidpere. This choice has been based on the singular power of expression of the artist’s work, its particular relevance in the current reality of social transformation.
Mark Raidpere, born in 1975 in Estonia, has shown a persistent and consistent search of the dynamic relationship between the evolution of self-identity and social events in the time of post-cold war transition. His work, utilising video as the main medium, penetrates and explores the psychological states of those living in our time of radical social change. Often putting himself, his family and entourage in the centre of his research and representation, Raidpere reveals with extraordinary sensitivity and efficiency the profound contradiction and dilemma that everyone is living and negotiating with in everyday life. Starting from this intimate relationship, he brings his observation and testimony further to the social terrain: people on the edge of the society, urban violence and street life, etc. are also important subject matters in his artistic endeavour. Through the artist’s particular manipulation of the video camera characterised by an articulation of simplicity, stillness and objectivity, human traumas and social dramas hidden behind the uncertainty of the everyday and difficulty of communication are powerfully exposed to the public gaze. This kind of uncanny state of existence, resulted from drastic social changes, is increasingly becoming the condition of contemporary humanity. This tendency is particularly visible and intense in societies like the ex-Soviet, Baltic countries in permanent quests of identity and coherence in the turbulence of the “revolution” from communist system to liberal capitalist globalisation. Raidpere, grown up in the midst of such a “revolution”, successfully grasps this sentiment in his art work and defuses it in the ambience of the exhibition space. The audience is moved by Raidpere’s seemingly simple presentation and inescapably immerged in puzzling, sometimes funny, but definitely unforgettable state of mind… We are all living in the same turbulence, indeed.
The 2008 edition of Ars Fennica has shown the achievements of five extraordinary artists. Mark Raidpere’s work is probably the most outstanding one in the context.
Hou Hanru (CN), Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, Chair of Exhibition and Museum Studies, San Francisco Art Institute, USA (2008)