Raija Malka & Kaija Saariaho: Blick

The audience is invited to participate in creating Blick by moving through it, observing it, becoming immersed in it or constructing their own arrangements. When arriving at the exhibition, the audience enters also the work of art. Blick features chairs and steps where visitors can sit and unhurriedly immerse themselves in the artwork’s world.

The exhibition title, Blick (Gaze), is a reference to a 1912 poem by artist Wassily Kandinsky. It is featured in Saariaho’s piece, Stilleben, which is heard in the exhibition. Built around it between 2019 and 2021 is the Blick sound environment, which intensifies the overall drama of the exhibition. Besides instruments and singing, we hear texts in various languages as well as interpersonal communication and travel-related sounds of vehicles, stations and telephone answering machines. The musical themes are distances and nostalgic longing.

In Blick, Raija Malka approaches different subjects from her oeuvre and creates a new entity, a large spatial work. The most central element to the work of art, consisting of five parts/pieces Utopie, Warten, Menschen, Blick ja Kiosk, is colour. In her structures, she uses pure single-colour and even colour surfaces, where fixed points for the gaze are taken over by light.

Raija Malka and Kaija Saariaho first became acquainted with each other in the early 1980s. Their friendship grew gradually and deepened as both lived in Paris for many years. 1993 marked the beginning of their first joint exhibition, Lady and the Unicorn. Since then, they have collaborated on nine projects, exhibitions, and different stage adaptations. Their roles are clear: the visual space is created by Raija, the sound by Kaija. Blick is their largest co-created artistic project so far.

A crucial project for Blick was the Njord Festival combining imagery and music that took place in Copenhagen in 2016. Kaija Saariaho, who had been invited to take part in the event, asked Raija Malka to be her work partner. Saariaho’s Stilleben was selected as the music, while Malka provided a large-scale structure and smaller boxes, providing the visitors with a setting to create their own compositions. This set the scene for elements that would later be expanded into Blick, the exhibition at Amos Rex.