1.6.2017 - 1.9.2023

The Summer Artist

City of Seinäjoki has hired each Summer since 2017 a young visual artist or visual art student to work as the summer artist. The Summer Artist, “Kesäkuvataiteilija” in Finnish, works for two months with their own independent artistic project. The idea is to create something that is visible to the local community and has participatory elements. The Summer Artist works at the Kunsthalle Seinäjoki and has the resources and support of our team and the Cultural Services of Seinäjoki. The Summer Artist can use the workshops space Itikka as their studio. The theme of the project is different each year but there is always a strong emphasis on participatory work-methods and public art.

Follow Summer Artist in Instagram: kesakuvataiteilija

 

The Summer Artists of the City of Seinäjoki:

Baran Caginli, 2023

Baran Caginli (b.1990, Istanbul) is the seventh Summer Artist at Kunsthalle Seinäjoki. He will work between the 19th of June and the 18th of August. During the summer Caginli begins a project that is an encounter between the artist and the local community and the exchange of knowledge to bake bread together. The artist will share his ceramic knowledge with people who can teach him their own, local or  inherited bread recipes. It will be a platform for sharing knowledge, experience, stories and learning from each other.  The artist will produce ceramic molds for baking breads in the form of recipe owners faces. The recipe owners will bake their own bread in these molds. In the end of the Summer artist’s job period, the bread will be eaten together at an event in the art and culture centre Kalevan Navetta.

Baran Caginli lives and works in Helsinki. His works underline universal and global concerns by highlighting the problematics of, and contradictions of power, governmental conflicts, military systems, systematic repression, identity, and discrimination. Through diverse media, including photography, sculpture, installation, and archival material, he includes elements of hand-made skill and techniques. Caginli integrates layers of camouflage or concealment, re-constituting them and giving them a voice in a new context, and to adding to them subtle messaging and gestures.

Baran Caginli received the ESSL Art Prize in 2015 and has been involved in many national and international collections and projects. Caginli’s work was exhibited at the Helsinki Biennale, 2021, and is currently on view at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts’ master’s degree exhibition, Kuvan Kevät 2023 in Helsinki.

How to participate

Do you have a bread recipe? If you would like to join the artist’s project or for hear more on how to participate, contact Kunsthalle Seinäjoki’s art producer Pii Anttila  Kunsthalle is looking for a maximum of 10 participants for the summer artist project.

 

Olivia Viitakangas, 2022

During the summer, Olivia Viitakangas did artistic research of Kalevalanpuisto in the Pohja district at Seinäjoki. Process-based performative work borrowed from the practices of the researcher and research. What is the nature and essence of the park? The activity included participation methods and interviews, collecting memories and observation the park. The collected data was compiled into a publication imitating a research paper: “On-going 06-08/22, objects, clues, hearings”. The name refers to the period that Viitakangas spent with Seinäjoki’s Kalevalanpuisto, examining its condition, events and past. The book consists of photographs and text fragments combining graphic elements. For example, by combining different paper qualities and using a special binding method, the book plays with its materiality, borrowing from archival methods. The work proposes the idea of ​​archiving the park by collecting and structuring objects and stories related to the place into a poetic form. The so-called “ordinary” suburban park became an arena for various events under close supervision. On the terms of art, Viitakangas of the archives ponders the nature of the park as a place and a misplace, and archiving itself as an act.

An edition of 150 copies was made of the work, and it was published by Utu Press, a small publishing house in Helsinki specializing in photographic art. The text fragments of the work have been compiled by Helmi Nöjd. Text is drawn from a conversation that Viitakangas had with a person who has lived her whole life near the park in the summer of 2022. Peppi-Lotta Heinonen was responsible for the graphic design of the book. The work was financially supported in addition to the Kunsthalle’s project budget by Kauno Ry. You can buy the book for yourself at the Taito Shop Seinäjoki store in Kalevan Navetta and in Helsinki at the Temporary Bookshelf, Hippolyte Gallery, and in Lahti at Galleria Uusi Kipinä.

Viitakangas also used Kunsthalle’s workshop space Itikka as a working space during the summer. In addition to the publication preview party, Viitakangas made an exhibition around the book, which was a site-specific installation. The installation continues with the topics of discovery and information structuring. The installation consisted of the structures of office desks belonging to the space and objects found in the park and related to archiving.

Olivia Viitakangas (b.1999) is a visual artist working with performativity, photography and video. In her work she deals with phenomena’s often through simulation and imitatation.  Viitakangas is studying photography at LAB Institute of Design and Fine Arts, Lahti, Finland.

 

 

 

Riikka Gröndahl 2021

Riikka Gröndahl‘s Silent Portrait was a participatory, open project where she filmed silent video portraits of people. After the summer, the video footage was be stored in the collection of the Seinäjoki Museums. Later, after decades, it can be shown to future generations. The art work invites us to reflect on what is happening right now and how we will be remembered when we are no longer here – and also perhaps the speciality of the contemporary time we are living in. At the end of the summer the video work was screened at the Kunsthalle before it was being stored in the museum collection.

 

 

 

 

 

Sofi Häkkinen 2020

Sofi Häkkinen‘s Serenpidity project invited visitors and citizens to visit the artist at the workshop space Itikka at the Kunsthalle and provide her with ideas, memories, dreams and materials for art works. She then created art works based on peoples’ suggestions. The audience could follow the process at the Itikka, or online. At the end of the Summer, Häkkinen held a pop up exibition to present the art works created over the 1 month period. She also brought the Recover Laboratory performance group to Seinäjoki to perform at the opening of What’s it like to be an animal? and Per Svensson’s Alchemy – The All Seeing Eye.

 

 

 

 

Aeon Lux 2019

Aeon Lux aimed to make Seinäjoki space-ready. The city has declared itself as the “capital of space” in its’ marketing, but what does it mean? Is the city fully prepared for the title?

The summer artist used social media to create a narrative of the city’s fictional sci-fi presence and past, galactical hitch-hiking culture and our relations to other space species. The artist made video works about the capital of space. They were published on the Kunsthalle Seinäjoki Youtube channel.

The summer artist made Space traffic signs that were installed to public spaces (in the picture). The signs for example showed where to hitch-hike to get a ride on a U.F.O, warned about strange light phenomenons and forbid creating crop circles. One of the signs is installed permanently in the yard of Kalevan Navetta. The summer artist also participated in different summer events in the city.

Aeon Lux (born 1993) makes video art, performance and paints. She graduated from the Kankaanpää Art School and currently lives and works in Seinäjoki.

 

Eetu Kevarinmäki 2018

Eetu Kevarinmäki made installations and site-specific art works during the summer. He also curated works by other artists to the public space. Installation by Ville Malja and a video work by Nayab Ikram were exhibited at the shopping mall Torikeskus for a week. KASA (Finnish for “PILE”) by Mikko Paakkonen and Mikko Heino (in the picture) was installed at the Citizen’s square in the Alvar Aalto centre.

The summer artist also made art works on his own. He repaired two bus stops and turned the idea of street art upside down. It is often considered vandalism, but is it always about messing up the public space? Could is also repair what’s damaged? In addition he also started individual photography projects that continued also after the summer.

Eetu Kevarinmäki (born 1993) is a visual artist and photographer. He graduated from the Turku Art Academy. In addition to visual art he is interested in producing projects and events.

 

Julia Kukkonen 2017

Julia Kukkonen explored Seinäjoki, a completely unfamiliar city with the means of performance over the Summer. She organised  open performance walks where the group explored the city centre in different ways, such as following a colour or a map of another city. The summer artist also sent messages in a bottle to flow in the Seinäjoki river and took over a parking spot in the centre for one day, to turn it into a pop-up café where locals would tell her about their home town. At the end of the two-month long exploration, she made the publication Where they do it themselves – an alternative guide to Seinäjoki.

Julia Kukkonen (born 1988) is a visual artist, innovator and gentle activist. She studied architecture at the Aalto University and graduated from the Kankaanpää Art School.