he series Instruments of Uprising is part of Kaisa Luukkonen’s artistic practice that works with emotions ability to shape futures. In this series of works, she focuses on the political agency of anger. Anger and aggression are energising and get people to move. The direction and form of that action are dependent on the cultural contest and available resources.
Luukkonen followed how the same bus stops were repeatedly broken and was intrigued by the conversation around the phenomena. The acts were seen either as senseless vandalism or one of the cases without context. However, if you spend even a short time in the streets, you get in contact with the energy of the young people that spend their time there. In the conversation with them, the pressure to assimilate and maintain the family’s value system, the wish of all parties for economic success, and the dissonance between the official Swedish policy and reality all come out. From all of this, a soup is cooked that overboils in various ways. The smallest materialisation of this overcooking is the braking of the safety glass elements of the bus stops. Instruments of Uprising is an attempt to listen to the anger in the actions without marginalising or invalidating the experiencers. By building replicas of objects used in different parts of the world in political resistance, Luukkonen wants to bring forth various forms of functionality of anger. Anger can be scary, but it tells us something essential about the world.
Kaisa Luukkonen is a Finnish artist living and working in Gothenburg, Sweden. Her interest in the field grew from her inability to orient or hold on to the future. Through Alternative Futures Studies, she found others with a similar ailment. From 2017 onwards, Luukkonen’s works have dealt with qualities of emotions and their ability to work on futures. In her art, she uses material-oriented and performative methods to plough new tracks in the snowdrift of the futures. In her works, wonder, hope and anger have acted as plough stakes. Kaisa Luukkonen’s performance work Blanking has been present in the 2019 Riga Performance Festival in Latvia and 2020 in the 13 Festival Göthenburg in Sweden. Works from the series Instruments of Uprising presented 2019 in Färjefabriken Stockholm and 2021 Galleria CC Malmö. The series is presented for the first time in this form in Myymälä2.
