Next week, Flis Holland and I will embark upon our collaborative project. Beginning with a week long residency / exhibition that has been secured at Vapaan Taiteen Tila in Helsinki, we hope to use this time to develop an ongoing research led project that can be presented across Europe over the next 5 years. This collaboration was initiated during the planning stages of a solo show of Flis’s work at Hanover Project, a gallery situated in Preston that I co-ordinate as part of my role as Fine Art Lecturer at UCLan.
In her practice, Flis Holland investigates the compulsion to return to locations that are no longer physically accessible, and their relationship to the places we currently inhabit. In particular she is interested in the use of scale reconstructions as a means of revisiting, further facilitated through the use of photography. I select and digitally archive places in moments of apparent stillness, unpopulated yet acutely defined by traces of human activity. Capturing failing architectural structures in apparent decline, I interrogate the relationship between digital technology and notions of presence, absence and temporality.
Whilst my practice strives to archive transient real time events, Holland seeks to reconstruct images that were never taken, moments that were never documented. Can the memory of a place be confined to a two dimensional digital representation, and does the construction of a replica in real space bring you closer to the space once inhabited? How can we better understand a site that no longer exists, that is no longer accessible and that can only be imagined?
The relationship between place, archive and memory will be explored at Vapaan Taiteen Tila, a subterranean ex-bunker in Helsinki, Finland.
Exhibition preview: Wed 16. April 5-7
Residency and exhibition opening hours: Thu 17. – Sat 19. 12-5
Vilhovuorenkuja 16, 00500 Helsinki, Finland
