A joint project between the Huuto people and the PARAZIT artist group from St. Petersburg started to be discussed in the summer of 2017 at the Art Fair in Finland. The driving force behind the collaboration was the desire to work together and get to know fellow artists, another artist collective and its operating environment.
Operating in the independent art field, PARAZIT’s operating idea is to expand and replicate gallery activities in different environments – either with or without the consent of the owners. Galleria Huuto, on the other hand, has established its position as an independent artist collective that offers gallery spaces for diverse exhibition activities.
We named the project The Story of Beginning and invited the registered artists to realize a visual circular, where each artist would have two weeks to realize a work. The previous works in the series would influence the current one.
The war of aggression started by Russia in the spring of 2022 interrupted the project. The chain of works was broken when 37 works were ready. Many things changed in an instant. What started out as a desire to do things together, to meet and get to know each other, turned into a break, lack of meeting, uncertainty and fear.
The war is still going on and at the same time the world around us is changing. What does it mean to present this collaboration in this world age? How will the images created before the war be viewed, and how will the collaboration that began before the war be viewed? We had numerous discussions together and with different parties. We think about the safety of our fellow artists. We are thinking about canceling the exhibition, the book and the project, or moving it to a time after the war. We are thinking about how to present the works, which in this situation we cannot transport to the gallery on site. As the project dragged on, a few artists left the project due to scheduling reasons, a few because they felt the project was impossible in this situation.
We don’t have one answer for how to act. At the same time, in our discussions we always ended up with the fact that censoring art and self-censorship are not automatically good ways of working; we wanted to continue to consider the situation together, preserving the freedom of the participating artists for their own expression, critical thinking, and the opportunity to deal with the feelings and thoughts that war creates.
Thus, the project is now presented as an exhibition and a book, where interruptions, gaps, uncertainty and shock are present. Parazit’s artists wanted to bring this out by turning everything upside down, i.e. the images of their works are presented as negatives as they wished. They also proposed a new name for the project: “The beginning – A New Abyss”.
