The jewelry condenses total violence, a beautiful shape and expensive, lofty and special materials. Hollywood stars and social beauties wore jewelry at dances and other occasions, and after World War II, Miss USA was photographed at the time with a highly radioactive, life-threatening piece of jewelry on her head. The images would spread in newspapers and magazines. The work illustrates this tension between the propaganda disguised as female beauty and the real effects of the bombs. In addition, through jewelry and its history, it deals more broadly with beauty, violence, and the power of the gaze.
The video work is a poetic journey, the starting and ending point of which is the birthplace of jewelry, the New Mexico desert. There, with the experiment, the atom was torn in half, every clock stopped and a new era in human history began. The birth of trinititis also marked a turning point in human and non-human history. The rapid nuclear explosion has left its long-lasting radioactive effects on our entire ecosystem. Atomic reflects on what has happened on a geological scale, both temporally and geographically, drawing in front of us images of the consequences of human actions and the resilience of the environment.
The video is part of an installation, the other part of which is a sculpture, a complete copy of the original 1945 jewelry. The installation, on the other hand, is part of a larger whole that deals with radioactivity from different perspectives. The project began when, in part by chance, a sample of stone ended up in the hands of the collective – a jar of vitreous matter from the world’s first nuclear test, trinitite. This matter has led the collective to a crisscrossing mycelium between science, history, culture, human and non-human. In the project, together with scientists, but in the context of art, the artists look at radioactivity and the invisible forces, processes beyond our comprehension, that affect our reality and inhabit us all.
HNV Collective is a collective of three Helsinki artists, consisting of Felicia Honkasalo, Akuliina Niemi and Sinna Virtanen . Honkasalo-Niemi-Virtanen travels on the border of art, history and science, utilizing various media and materials. At the heart of their research-driven work are historical narratives and interfaces between scientific facts, myths, and imagination.
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Atomic is a work commissioned by the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art RIBOCA2. Its implementation has been supported by the Kone Foundation, AVEK, the Nordic Culture Point and Frame Finland.
Credits: Art Lab / Jussi Liukkonen, Eija Tuominen / Institute of Physics, University of Helsinki – Detector Laboratory, Faunatar Myyrmanni, Hanaholmen – Swedish-Finnish Cultural Center, Kallio High School, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma / National Gallery, Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, Valofirma
