Trance explores how artworks can complicate and aid in examining sensory experience in a technologically mediated world. The exhibition is a swirl in time: a spiral moving between humane and mechanical, fantastical and factual, allure and absence. It aims to disorient and reorient the viewer and the viewing situation. Here, the act of watching itself is under scrutiny. The closer one gets to the real, the more imaginary it becomes.
The tapestry of images and information is dense, endless. It’s threading seems to follow a pulse that is all-encompassing, yet unfathomable. But no surface is impenetrable. There are loopholes that encourage us to shift the perspective or embark on a search for the furthest end of the wild yarn… The question is, what happens when the eyes are closed? Which narratives continue to be looped, and what kind of emotions surface? Whose voices are speaking?
Trance brings together local and international artists of different generations who work with various disciplines. The artists in the exhibition absorb, hack and reformat conventional means of (audio)visual presentation through existing and newly commissioned work. They present idiosyncratic encounters between bodies and technologies and utilise glitch as a conceptual tool – a split in time, a gesture that by design requires a moment of remediation and reflection.
Ilari Laamanen is an independent curator based in New York. Through his projects he contemplates on challenges and possibilities of communication in hyperconnected culture. He worked as the Director of Programs at the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York (2013–2020) where he co-founded and led the MOBIUS Fellowship Program for independent and institutional curators. Laamanen received his MA in Curating, Managing and Mediating Art at the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture and his BA in Media studies at the University of Turku.
Curator: Ilari Laamanen
