KuvA Research Days 2024, Day 1: Taking Back the Museum
The first day of the KuvA Research Days invites us to take a reflective look back and to examine the kinds of relationships that have been identified and addressed during the research project.
Taking Back the Museum – Opening the spaces of community museums to recover the art of Indigenous people
Partly streamed on the Uniarts Helsinki YouTube channel (Time zone: UTC +2).
Program only onsite: 10.12.2024, at 9:00-11:30, in Kuva/Tila gallery.
Program onsite (at 12:30-18.00) in the White Studio 10.12.2024 and also streamed 10.12.2024, at 12:30-16:20.
The link to the YouTube streaming 10.12.2024 (at 12:30-16:20)
(Time zone: UTC +2).
Host: Lea Kantonen, Professor Emerita, Artistic research, Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki
The research project Taking Back the Museum – Opening the spaces of community museums to recover the art of Indigenous people (2021–2024), funded by the Kone Foundation, will finish at the end of this year.
We wrote in our research plan (2020): “There is a need to question how to best use our research to stem the tide of ruination, present in our time (Tsing & al. 2017). The project aims at rethinking things and landscapes as known and protected by heritage and environmental institutions and sciences. National parks, herding land, sacred sites and objects at museums are all haunted. They have an existence in science as protected objects, but they also have a mode of existence that is unseen and unrecognized. What is invisible are the stories in which they were once embedded in sets of relations, before they were reduced by colonialism. “Colonisation is thingification,” wrote Césaire (1996), one of the founders of postcolonial thought. A world that had been domesticated by colonial taxonomies and techniques implies extracting them from their local relationships. A decolonial practice would imply slowing down, questioning the connections that had been taught, erased, and reduced to things. Green (2020) encourages us to find the place where some existence got lost and where they lost their ontological moorings. In this project we will identify these places in order to release the lost connections and argue that artistic research is a powerful route to do so.”
During the four years we have worked with Indigenous textile art arranging yarn painting workshops with Wixárika artists in three communities and researching community archives in Sápmi. We have worked with the archive of the Sámi healer Knut Lunde. We have collaborated with the Indigenous Studies Ărramăt project led by Alberta University in Canada.
During this Research Day we will take a reflective look back to see what kind of relations we have identified and addressed. We shall share with you the artistic collaborations of our project at the exhibition Different Points of Return in the morning in the Kuva/Tila gallery and discuss our research further at the White Studio in the afternoon. Finally, you can mold beeswax and wool with your hands at the remote Nierika workshop by the Wixárika artist Juan Aurelio Carrillo Rios.
Program
Tuesday 10.12.2024
Venue: Kuva/Tila gallery, Academy of Fine Arts (Sörnäisten rantatie 19, Helsinki)
This part of the program is only onsite (10.12.2024, at 9:00-11:30)
- 8:30 Coffee – NOTE: Coffe is served in the White Studio
- 9:00 Lea Kantonen: Different Points of Return – Introduction and a tour in the exhibition
- 9:45 Hanna Guttorm: Gulahallat eatnamiin: Re-searching good-enough life
- 10:15 Coffee
- 10:30 “Gulahallat eatnamiin”, listening with the earth – Screening of a community video by the Arramat-project
- 11:00 Discussion by the lávvu, a Sámi tent
- 11:30 Lunch
Venue (from 12:30): The White Studio (Valkoinen studio), Academy of Fine Arts (Sörnäisten rantatie 19, Helsinki)
This part of the days program is onsite and also streamed (10.12.2024, at 12:30-16:20 Finnish time) on the Uniarts Helsinki YouTube channel. (Time zone: UTC +2).
The link to the YouTube streaming 10.12.2024 (at 12:30-16:20)
- 12:30 Lea Kantonen: Welcoming words and presentation of the exhibition Different points of Return for the remote participants
- 12:45 Pekka Kantonen: Generational Filming as a method of conversation and remembering in the planning process of a community museum (in person)
- 13:30 Katri Hirvonen-Nurmi: School and museum as alternative learning spaces and transgenerational meeting points (in person)
- 14:05 Coffee
- 14:20 Katarina Pirak Sikku: Árbbehárpo/Arvstrådarna. Artistic research on family heritage (online)
- 14:50 Lea Kantonen: Pluriversal artistic collaboration: Sacrifice at the networks of living humans, ancestors, and artworks (in person)
- 15:30 Kɨpaima Norma Robles: Moises y la Muerte (Moses and the Death), presentation and screening (online)
- 16:00 Nierika – Remote yarn painting workshop by Juan Aurelio Carrillo Rios (online)
- 18:00 Day ends
Speakers
- Juan Aurelio Carrillo Rios, Autonomous University of Nayarit, Mexico
- Hanna Guttorm: University of Helsinki, Sámi University of Applied Sciences
- Katri Hirvonen-Nurmi, University of Helsinki
- Britt Kramvig, Arctic University of Norway / lecture cancelled due to illness
- Pekka Kantonen, the Research Institute, Uniarts Helsinki
- Kɨpaima Norma Robles, Autonomous University of Querétaro, Mexico
- Katarina Pirak Sikku, Uppsala University
Exhibition: Different Points of Return
29.11.–15.12.2024
KuvA/Tila gallery, the Academy of Fine Arts (Sörnäisten rantatie 19, Helsinki)
The research project Taking Back the Museum – Opening the Space of Community Museums to Recover the Art of Indigenous People (2021–2024) aims to reverse the pattern of taking Indigenous art objects to Western museums by collaborating with Indigenous communities while citing recent decolonial and post-human art discussions, which deal with Indigenous people and often stem from their communities originally. The exhibition Different Points of Return addresses the multi-layered outcomes of the project. Read more
Taking Back the Museum – Opening the spaces of community museums to recover the art of Indigenous people
Partly streamed on the Uniarts Helsinki YouTube channel (Time zone: UTC +2).
Program only onsite: 10.12.2024, at 9:00-11:30, in Kuva/Tila gallery.
Program onsite (at 12:30-18.00) in the White Studio 10.12.2024 and also streamed 10.12.2024, at 12:30-16:20.
The link to the YouTube streaming 10.12.2024 (at 12:30-16:20)
(Time zone: UTC +2).
Host: Lea Kantonen, Professor Emerita, Artistic research, Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki
The research project Taking Back the Museum – Opening the spaces of community museums to recover the art of Indigenous people (2021–2024), funded by the Kone Foundation, will finish at the end of this year.
We wrote in our research plan (2020): “There is a need to question how to best use our research to stem the tide of ruination, present in our time (Tsing & al. 2017). The project aims at rethinking things and landscapes as known and protected by heritage and environmental institutions and sciences. National parks, herding land, sacred sites and objects at museums are all haunted. They have an existence in science as protected objects, but they also have a mode of existence that is unseen and unrecognized. What is invisible are the stories in which they were once embedded in sets of relations, before they were reduced by colonialism. “Colonisation is thingification,” wrote Césaire (1996), one of the founders of postcolonial thought. A world that had been domesticated by colonial taxonomies and techniques implies extracting them from their local relationships. A decolonial practice would imply slowing down, questioning the connections that had been taught, erased, and reduced to things. Green (2020) encourages us to find the place where some existence got lost and where they lost their ontological moorings. In this project we will identify these places in order to release the lost connections and argue that artistic research is a powerful route to do so.”
During the four years we have worked with Indigenous textile art arranging yarn painting workshops with Wixárika artists in three communities and researching community archives in Sápmi. We have worked with the archive of the Sámi healer Knut Lunde. We have collaborated with the Indigenous Studies Ărramăt project led by Alberta University in Canada.
During this Research Day we will take a reflective look back to see what kind of relations we have identified and addressed. We shall share with you the artistic collaborations of our project at the exhibition Different Points of Return in the morning in the Kuva/Tila gallery and discuss our research further at the White Studio in the afternoon. Finally, you can mold beeswax and wool with your hands at the remote Nierika workshop by the Wixárika artist Juan Aurelio Carrillo Rios.
Program
Tuesday 10.12.2024
Venue: Kuva/Tila gallery, Academy of Fine Arts (Sörnäisten rantatie 19, Helsinki)
This part of the program is only onsite (10.12.2024, at 9:00-11:30)
- 8:30 Coffee – NOTE: Coffe is served in the White Studio
- 9:00 Lea Kantonen: Different Points of Return – Introduction and a tour in the exhibition
- 9:45 Hanna Guttorm: Gulahallat eatnamiin: Re-searching good-enough life
- 10:15 Coffee
- 10:30 “Gulahallat eatnamiin”, listening with the earth – Screening of a community video by the Arramat-project
- 11:00 Discussion by the lávvu, a Sámi tent
- 11:30 Lunch
Venue (from 12:30): The White Studio (Valkoinen studio), Academy of Fine Arts (Sörnäisten rantatie 19, Helsinki)
This part of the days program is onsite and also streamed (10.12.2024, at 12:30-16:20 Finnish time) on the Uniarts Helsinki YouTube channel. (Time zone: UTC +2).
The link to the YouTube streaming 10.12.2024 (at 12:30-16:20)
- 12:30 Lea Kantonen: Welcoming words and presentation of the exhibition Different points of Return for the remote participants
- 12:45 Pekka Kantonen: Generational Filming as a method of conversation and remembering in the planning process of a community museum (in person)
- 13:30 Katri Hirvonen-Nurmi: School and museum as alternative learning spaces and transgenerational meeting points (in person)
- 14:05 Coffee
- 14:20 Katarina Pirak Sikku: Árbbehárpo/Arvstrådarna. Artistic research on family heritage (online)
- 14:50 Lea Kantonen: Pluriversal artistic collaboration: Sacrifice at the networks of living humans, ancestors, and artworks (in person)
- 15:30 Kɨpaima Norma Robles: Moises y la Muerte (Moses and the Death), presentation and screening (online)
- 16:00 Nierika – Remote yarn painting workshop by Juan Aurelio Carrillo Rios (online)
- 18:00 Day ends
Speakers
- Juan Aurelio Carrillo Rios, Autonomous University of Nayarit, Mexico
- Hanna Guttorm: University of Helsinki, Sámi University of Applied Sciences
- Katri Hirvonen-Nurmi, University of Helsinki
- Britt Kramvig, Arctic University of Norway / lecture cancelled due to illness
- Pekka Kantonen, the Research Institute, Uniarts Helsinki
- Kɨpaima Norma Robles, Autonomous University of Querétaro, Mexico
- Katarina Pirak Sikku, Uppsala University
Exhibition: Different Points of Return
29.11.–15.12.2024
KuvA/Tila gallery, the Academy of Fine Arts (Sörnäisten rantatie 19, Helsinki)
The research project Taking Back the Museum – Opening the Space of Community Museums to Recover the Art of Indigenous People (2021–2024) aims to reverse the pattern of taking Indigenous art objects to Western museums by collaborating with Indigenous communities while citing recent decolonial and post-human art discussions, which deal with Indigenous people and often stem from their communities originally. The exhibition Different Points of Return addresses the multi-layered outcomes of the project. Read more