David Elliott (UK):
It was extremely difficult to make a choice about the “winner” from the five artist candidates for the Ars Fennica Prize. Not only do I believe that art is not a competition, although it may and certainly should be a struggle with one’s material and own self, but also I was being asked to distinguish between works which in their origins, media and intentions were essentially incomparable. For me this was not an issue of the quality of one artist over another, in this respect the standard was encouragingly uniform, but rather of my experience of the works in the exhibition and then putting this together with what else about the artists’ previous production I was either able to see directly or to understand from conversation and catalogues. As a result of this I now realize that I have tended to privilege what I perceived as of the moment, experiential, even visceral, rather than work that is more reflective or conceptual.
From this point of view I have decided to award the Prize to Charles Sandison whose Language as a mirror of the world, a sinewy installation of multiply projected words and light, snakes around all the surfaces in the gallery where it is shown, reflected endlessly, removing any normal sense of space, of earth, of heaven or air. The breathless impression of potential vastness which this creates is little short of sublime as one’s body is overlaid and absorbed by the neo-baroque curlicues, constant movements and overlaid meanings of the texts.
Yet there is far more to this work than the frenetic activity of seemingly random groups of words with the illusion or promise of infinite space. Powered by a number of computers, which in another context could run the whole traffic system of Helsinki, the body of this work is taken from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Brittanica, an edition no longer in copyright which has served as a basis for many articles in the current Wikipedia. In Sandison’s hands this repository of “universal” knowledge becomes like a Book of Life to be edited, cut into, fractured, overlaid and endlessly repeated as a microcosm of creation itself. The computer programme the artist has created to do this involves the constant sorting of information in which a word, or group of words, are separated and then chase each other in an effort to regain coherence by becoming reunited with their points of origin.
It takes many months for this process to be completed. At this point the encyclopedia would be reconstituted in its original form, and after a brief moment of stasis the whole process would start again. So far, so existential…..But the reason why I have chosen this work goes far beyond this. For me, Sandison transcends the depressing Beckettian cycle of a dull, brutal life of endless repetition to suggest a rich, wondrous universe, crammed with infinite possibilities and combinations, which at its point of origin and end reverts to a single small breath.
David Elliott (UK), Director for Istanbul Modern, Artistic Director for the Sydney biennale, curator, writer (2010)