On Shyness: A Finnish/Pan-African Approach
A cooperation between Uniarts Helsinki and the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos as part of the Finland Africa Platform for Innovation.
Introduction
This series of five workshops, exploring the aesthetics of shyness, span a two-week period from August 11–24, 2024 and are produced in collaboration with selected arts organisations in the Helsinki area. The workshops consist of a series of facilitating artist/curator-initiated exercises that open and explore varied dimensions of the concept of shyness.
Participants are invited to reflect on their own cultural and personal perceptions of what ‘shyness’ is/might be and to develop sketches towards artistic works, in collaborative groups, that explore these emerging understandings. The workshops are open to the public, by invitation from the host organizations, and to a wide-range of material practices and modes of working.
On Shyness began as a workshop, hosted in Lagos, Nigeria, that a small group of Finland-based and Africa-based colleagues will now carry to Helsinki. In Lagos, we began our investigation of shyness from the ecological phenomenon known as crown shyness, whereby trees of similar and differing species, under certain conditions, exhibit an awareness of each other, restricting their own growth to allow space for light to travel between them. Shyness is an often-maligned contemporary character trait, when used with reference to humans, and yet one that is commonly found in art and artists. In a presentation-oriented time, we gather to wonder, what ways of knowing, and not knowing, might we find trapped in the resistant posture of shyness?
This series of workshops grows out of an ongoing, multi-year collaboration around experimental artist pedagogies between Uniarts Helsinki and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos. The work is part of the Finland-Africa Platform for Innovation, FAPI (currently funded by the Ministry of Culture and Education, founded and coordinated by University of Turku).
Research group and workshop facilitation team
- Bernard Akoi-Jackson, Painting and Sculpture, Art and the Built Environment, KNUST, Ghana
- Nontobeko Ntombela, Curatorial, Publics and Visual Cultures, Wits University, South Africa
- Odun Orimolade, Fine Art and Curatorial in the Yaba Art Museum, Yaba Tech, Nigeria
- Meri Linna, Sculptor and Performance Artist, Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Finland
- Gesa Piper, Dancer and Dance Pedagogue, Theatre Academy, Helsinki, Finland
- Daniel Peltz, Time and Space Arts, Site and Situation Specific Practices, Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Finland (Uniarts Helsinki project-lead)
- Oyindamola Fakeye, CCA Lagos, Nigeria (CCA Lagos project-lead)
- Taru Elfving, Writer and Curator, PRAXIS, Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Finland
- Alyssa Coffin, Interdisciplinary Artist and Curatorial Assistant for the Helsinki Shyness Workshops, Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Finland
Tentative program of workshops
Tuesday, August 13th
At Kuva/Uniarts in collaboration with Maa Art School
Facilitator: Meri Linna
Helsinki, Finland
Meri Linna (she/her, they/them) is a visual artist working predominantly with various collaborations, the most prominent being their engagement with the duo Harrie Liveart since 2010. Linna has been teaching art for people of all ages and since 2016 as an hour-based teacher at different departments at the Art University’s Fine Arts Academy, from which they themselves graduated in sculptural studies 2014.
Workshop Offering: Speaking shyly through clay
This workshop is exploring shyness through the materiality of clay, body and space. Through simple exercises we are warming up, to create a language which is not a verbal and spoken language, but a language which is new to all of us, called: Clay.
Often we are finding ourselves in a situation where we are not able to communicate through our first language. Even though we might get accustomed to it through experience, it might at first come with an aspect of shyness and evidently it sets a power dynamic through the individual’s language knowledge. The premise in this workshop challenges these dynamics by rejecting the spoken languages all together and instead playfully introduces a non-verbal language, new to everyone, to be developed together as a group.
Friday, August 16th
At/in collaboration with Publics
Facilitator: Nontobeko Ntombela
Johannesburg, South Africa
Nontobeko Ntombela works in the Department of Curatorial, Public and Visual Cultures, Wits School of Arts, Johannesburg. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary South African art, with a particular interest in Black women artists. Nontobeko previously worked as a curator for organisations including Johannesburg Art Gallery and Durban University Art Gallery. Recent curatorial projects include Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting: Esther Mahlangu, A Retrospective at Iziko South African National Galleries, Cape Town, and Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg; When Rain Clouds Gather: South African Black Women Artists 1940–2000 at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town; and The Burden of Memory at multiple venues in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Nontobeko has advised organisations including the South African Department of Arts and Culture, Art for Human Rights Trust and the National Arts Council of South Africa.
Workshop Offering: Public Introverts: On Curatorial Shyness
It is hard to imagine a contemporary art world without curators. The long list of household names of tastemakers of the global art world is a good indicator of how curators are heralded as much as the artists they support today. Their increased presence and influence have earned them the power that has significantly impacted the art world, shaping artists’ careers, scholarly research, and the broader values of art. In this light, curatorial practice exists in a world where it continuously interfaces with the public. This kind of visibility implicates how curators appear and are perceived in the world. It assumes a practice of public presence and appearances by people who are always extroverted, boisterous, and confident.
This workshop considers the different characteristics of curators and curatorial practices and proposes a curator who may identify with public introvertedness. Not only as a personality trait, it proposes a way of working that might be considered shy. Using the modality of zine making, the workshop will explore how the extroverted world of exhibitions and public engagement in curatorial work can be understood as a moment to perform a coming out of the shy shell in social situations. It explores the concept of curatorial shyness and its manifestations in the curatorial process, from concept development to audience interaction.
To do this, the workshop mobilised the concept of accentedness. Coined by Carli Coetzee, accentedness articulates not the way we speak with an ‘accent’ but instead as accents of multiple forms of storytelling, even if those accounts might be conflicting. Grounded in linguistic translation and the impact of the history of apartheid, this concept offers a unique approach to storytelling, challenging how the same histories can be told from different perspectives.
In the workshop, participants will be paired to tell each other their stories towards making Zines. This is designed to highlight unique and diverse possibilities of contemplative engagement and collaborative curation through the idea of shyness. It takes into consideration how curators have to engage in different contexts. Usually working in precarious contexts, curators sometimes have limited resources to tell these stories. They also sometimes have to deal with archival/historical inaccuracies or misinterpretations of narratives they come across.
To this, the workshop asks; How can shyness and accentedness contribute to diverse ways of presenting ideas and narratives? Thought of in another way, if curatorial shyness is then accented, how can shyness and accentedness propose ways of working that might include ideas of curatorial listening and (un)learning?
Tuesday, August 20th
At Teak/Uniarts, in collaboration with Globe Art Point
Facilitator: Gesa Piper
Helsinki, Finland
Gesa is a Dance Artist and Pedagogue who grew up in Germany and started her artistic carrer in the Netherlands. She has been based in Finland for 13 years, where her interest shifted towards the embodied entanglements within circumstance and environment, also supported through her studies in Chinese Medicine and her strong interest in indigenous thinking. Furthermore, temporality and spectra of time through artistic investigations on personal and collective memory has become a big part of her artistic endeavors.
Workshop Offering: Shyness as potentiality
How can shyness be explored as a space of potentiality? What if shyness opens into a realm of all possible “not yet’s”? How do we meet ourselves and one another from this state of receptive listening? Not-yet imposing anything in particular, but with a curious openness towards a multitude of possibilities. This workshop explores how to listen into the participants own and share psychophysical space through and with multiple “towards-nesses” from an embodied place. Rather than reducing shyness to a personality trait, we approach shyness as a state within a process and a dynamic within a constellation. We will tune various body systems and sense perceptions through which psychophysical states of shyness can be observed and studied, as well as dynamics that accompany, evoke, complement, balance or counter dynamics of shyness.
Wednesday, August 21st
At/in collaboration with Museum of Impossible Forms (MIF)
Afternoon session open to the public.
Facilitator: Bernard Akoi-Jackson
Kumasi, Ghana
Bernard Akoi-Jackson (PhD), is a contemporary Ghanaian artist writer, curator and educator who lives and works from Tema/Accra/Kumasi or any site that loosely falls within his post-studio praxis. His general artistic practice and research trajectory revolve around a critique of post- and de-coloniality; an investigation of quotidian interactions and gestures through movement and object-oriented situations; and an engagement of linguistic quirks via textual inventions, revisions and wit. He instigates immersive, absurdist public interventions and conditions that are both atmospherically dense, yet permeable to critical audience reactions. His multi-disciplinary, audience-implicating installations and performative pseudo-rituals, have featured in exhibitions across the world. Akoi-Jackson has co-curated exhibitions with blaxTARLINES KUMASI. He lectures in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, KNUST, with particular interests in disruption and the revolutionary potential in contemporary art practice.
Workshop Offering: Re-Call Wreck All…
(little deeds in memory or for a memorialization of skills and means we’ve forgotten, almost had or didn’t at all have).
Re-Call Wreck All is a collaborative gesture between Bernard Akoi-Jackson (On Shyness workshop) and the Museum of Impossible Forms. It is proposed as a site-specific experimental event. It manifests as a participatory and performative intervention in two parts: a set of activities to be undertaken by specifically invited participants and a public forum. It will be located within the Museum of Impossible Forms and is open for public engagement and interaction, particularly in the forum. The entire set up functions as a sculptural/object-oriented installation and simultaneously provides the physical context for the performative engagement. All are cordially invited to come engage and discuss our collective condition.
The afternoon session of the workshop will be open to the public. From 13:00-16:00 visitors are invited to participate in an open format workshop that allows them to come and go from MIF as they please.
Thursday, August 22nd
At Kuva/Uniarts, in collaboration with Myymälä 2
Will begin with a walk between Töölö Towers and Kuva.
Facilitator: Odun Orimolade / Lagos, Nigeria
Odun Orimolade is an artist, academic, and cultural practitioner who directs her work in trans-disciplinary approaches, research, and collaborations. She maintains an open contexture to her engagements, attending to a mix of ideologies and worldviews, frequently addressing the plausibility of thought, space and the intangible. This lends itself to investigations of human behavioral tendencies, orientation, and interaction as navigational mechanisms. She is interested in participatory research practices as an intervention into various spaces. Orimolade lectures in the Fine Art Department, Yaba College of Technology. She has served as coordinator for the UNESCO/UNEVOC center for research and sustainable development, Sub-Dean of the School of Art, Design, and Printing, and Curator of the Yusuf Grillo Gallery. She is Curatorial Director of the Yaba Art Museum. She organises the Annual Performance Art Intensive Workshop in Lagos. Orimolade is a Research Fellow of the College of Human Sciences, University of South Africa.
Workshop Offering: Memory mutations
The workshop offering nurses an idea about memory transplantation which would be apt coming into a new space. This hypothetical concept of transferring memories from one individual to another will be explored through the lenses of cognition, conation, and emotional regulation to understand its potential impact on navigating forms of shyness. The morphing and elusive characteristics of memory and memory making are interesting mechanisms for exploring ideas of shyness. The activities will involve an exploration of functions and pathways to engage diversities that impact us in new or other spaces and how they can be managed by understanding the processes in theories of action for learning, reflection and navigation.
Project name
On Shyness
Time
08/2024-08/2024
Contact
For more information on the program, please contact Daniel Peltz, Uniarts Finland Africa Platform for Innovation Project Lead.
+358503289565
daniel.peltz@uniarts.fi
Introduction
This series of five workshops, exploring the aesthetics of shyness, span a two-week period from August 11–24, 2024 and are produced in collaboration with selected arts organisations in the Helsinki area. The workshops consist of a series of facilitating artist/curator-initiated exercises that open and explore varied dimensions of the concept of shyness.
Participants are invited to reflect on their own cultural and personal perceptions of what ‘shyness’ is/might be and to develop sketches towards artistic works, in collaborative groups, that explore these emerging understandings. The workshops are open to the public, by invitation from the host organizations, and to a wide-range of material practices and modes of working.
On Shyness began as a workshop, hosted in Lagos, Nigeria, that a small group of Finland-based and Africa-based colleagues will now carry to Helsinki. In Lagos, we began our investigation of shyness from the ecological phenomenon known as crown shyness, whereby trees of similar and differing species, under certain conditions, exhibit an awareness of each other, restricting their own growth to allow space for light to travel between them. Shyness is an often-maligned contemporary character trait, when used with reference to humans, and yet one that is commonly found in art and artists. In a presentation-oriented time, we gather to wonder, what ways of knowing, and not knowing, might we find trapped in the resistant posture of shyness?
This series of workshops grows out of an ongoing, multi-year collaboration around experimental artist pedagogies between Uniarts Helsinki and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos. The work is part of the Finland-Africa Platform for Innovation, FAPI (currently funded by the Ministry of Culture and Education, founded and coordinated by University of Turku).
Research group and workshop facilitation team
- Bernard Akoi-Jackson, Painting and Sculpture, Art and the Built Environment, KNUST, Ghana
- Nontobeko Ntombela, Curatorial, Publics and Visual Cultures, Wits University, South Africa
- Odun Orimolade, Fine Art and Curatorial in the Yaba Art Museum, Yaba Tech, Nigeria
- Meri Linna, Sculptor and Performance Artist, Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Finland
- Gesa Piper, Dancer and Dance Pedagogue, Theatre Academy, Helsinki, Finland
- Daniel Peltz, Time and Space Arts, Site and Situation Specific Practices, Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Finland (Uniarts Helsinki project-lead)
- Oyindamola Fakeye, CCA Lagos, Nigeria (CCA Lagos project-lead)
- Taru Elfving, Writer and Curator, PRAXIS, Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Finland
- Alyssa Coffin, Interdisciplinary Artist and Curatorial Assistant for the Helsinki Shyness Workshops, Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Finland
Tentative program of workshops
Tuesday, August 13th
At Kuva/Uniarts in collaboration with Maa Art School
Facilitator: Meri Linna
Helsinki, Finland
Meri Linna (she/her, they/them) is a visual artist working predominantly with various collaborations, the most prominent being their engagement with the duo Harrie Liveart since 2010. Linna has been teaching art for people of all ages and since 2016 as an hour-based teacher at different departments at the Art University’s Fine Arts Academy, from which they themselves graduated in sculptural studies 2014.
Workshop Offering: Speaking shyly through clay
This workshop is exploring shyness through the materiality of clay, body and space. Through simple exercises we are warming up, to create a language which is not a verbal and spoken language, but a language which is new to all of us, called: Clay.
Often we are finding ourselves in a situation where we are not able to communicate through our first language. Even though we might get accustomed to it through experience, it might at first come with an aspect of shyness and evidently it sets a power dynamic through the individual’s language knowledge. The premise in this workshop challenges these dynamics by rejecting the spoken languages all together and instead playfully introduces a non-verbal language, new to everyone, to be developed together as a group.
Friday, August 16th
At/in collaboration with Publics
Facilitator: Nontobeko Ntombela
Johannesburg, South Africa
Nontobeko Ntombela works in the Department of Curatorial, Public and Visual Cultures, Wits School of Arts, Johannesburg. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary South African art, with a particular interest in Black women artists. Nontobeko previously worked as a curator for organisations including Johannesburg Art Gallery and Durban University Art Gallery. Recent curatorial projects include Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting: Esther Mahlangu, A Retrospective at Iziko South African National Galleries, Cape Town, and Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg; When Rain Clouds Gather: South African Black Women Artists 1940–2000 at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town; and The Burden of Memory at multiple venues in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Nontobeko has advised organisations including the South African Department of Arts and Culture, Art for Human Rights Trust and the National Arts Council of South Africa.
Workshop Offering: Public Introverts: On Curatorial Shyness
It is hard to imagine a contemporary art world without curators. The long list of household names of tastemakers of the global art world is a good indicator of how curators are heralded as much as the artists they support today. Their increased presence and influence have earned them the power that has significantly impacted the art world, shaping artists’ careers, scholarly research, and the broader values of art. In this light, curatorial practice exists in a world where it continuously interfaces with the public. This kind of visibility implicates how curators appear and are perceived in the world. It assumes a practice of public presence and appearances by people who are always extroverted, boisterous, and confident.
This workshop considers the different characteristics of curators and curatorial practices and proposes a curator who may identify with public introvertedness. Not only as a personality trait, it proposes a way of working that might be considered shy. Using the modality of zine making, the workshop will explore how the extroverted world of exhibitions and public engagement in curatorial work can be understood as a moment to perform a coming out of the shy shell in social situations. It explores the concept of curatorial shyness and its manifestations in the curatorial process, from concept development to audience interaction.
To do this, the workshop mobilised the concept of accentedness. Coined by Carli Coetzee, accentedness articulates not the way we speak with an ‘accent’ but instead as accents of multiple forms of storytelling, even if those accounts might be conflicting. Grounded in linguistic translation and the impact of the history of apartheid, this concept offers a unique approach to storytelling, challenging how the same histories can be told from different perspectives.
In the workshop, participants will be paired to tell each other their stories towards making Zines. This is designed to highlight unique and diverse possibilities of contemplative engagement and collaborative curation through the idea of shyness. It takes into consideration how curators have to engage in different contexts. Usually working in precarious contexts, curators sometimes have limited resources to tell these stories. They also sometimes have to deal with archival/historical inaccuracies or misinterpretations of narratives they come across.
To this, the workshop asks; How can shyness and accentedness contribute to diverse ways of presenting ideas and narratives? Thought of in another way, if curatorial shyness is then accented, how can shyness and accentedness propose ways of working that might include ideas of curatorial listening and (un)learning?
Tuesday, August 20th
At Teak/Uniarts, in collaboration with Globe Art Point
Facilitator: Gesa Piper
Helsinki, Finland
Gesa is a Dance Artist and Pedagogue who grew up in Germany and started her artistic carrer in the Netherlands. She has been based in Finland for 13 years, where her interest shifted towards the embodied entanglements within circumstance and environment, also supported through her studies in Chinese Medicine and her strong interest in indigenous thinking. Furthermore, temporality and spectra of time through artistic investigations on personal and collective memory has become a big part of her artistic endeavors.
Workshop Offering: Shyness as potentiality
How can shyness be explored as a space of potentiality? What if shyness opens into a realm of all possible “not yet’s”? How do we meet ourselves and one another from this state of receptive listening? Not-yet imposing anything in particular, but with a curious openness towards a multitude of possibilities. This workshop explores how to listen into the participants own and share psychophysical space through and with multiple “towards-nesses” from an embodied place. Rather than reducing shyness to a personality trait, we approach shyness as a state within a process and a dynamic within a constellation. We will tune various body systems and sense perceptions through which psychophysical states of shyness can be observed and studied, as well as dynamics that accompany, evoke, complement, balance or counter dynamics of shyness.
Wednesday, August 21st
At/in collaboration with Museum of Impossible Forms (MIF)
Afternoon session open to the public.
Facilitator: Bernard Akoi-Jackson
Kumasi, Ghana
Bernard Akoi-Jackson (PhD), is a contemporary Ghanaian artist writer, curator and educator who lives and works from Tema/Accra/Kumasi or any site that loosely falls within his post-studio praxis. His general artistic practice and research trajectory revolve around a critique of post- and de-coloniality; an investigation of quotidian interactions and gestures through movement and object-oriented situations; and an engagement of linguistic quirks via textual inventions, revisions and wit. He instigates immersive, absurdist public interventions and conditions that are both atmospherically dense, yet permeable to critical audience reactions. His multi-disciplinary, audience-implicating installations and performative pseudo-rituals, have featured in exhibitions across the world. Akoi-Jackson has co-curated exhibitions with blaxTARLINES KUMASI. He lectures in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, KNUST, with particular interests in disruption and the revolutionary potential in contemporary art practice.
Workshop Offering: Re-Call Wreck All…
(little deeds in memory or for a memorialization of skills and means we’ve forgotten, almost had or didn’t at all have).
Re-Call Wreck All is a collaborative gesture between Bernard Akoi-Jackson (On Shyness workshop) and the Museum of Impossible Forms. It is proposed as a site-specific experimental event. It manifests as a participatory and performative intervention in two parts: a set of activities to be undertaken by specifically invited participants and a public forum. It will be located within the Museum of Impossible Forms and is open for public engagement and interaction, particularly in the forum. The entire set up functions as a sculptural/object-oriented installation and simultaneously provides the physical context for the performative engagement. All are cordially invited to come engage and discuss our collective condition.
The afternoon session of the workshop will be open to the public. From 13:00-16:00 visitors are invited to participate in an open format workshop that allows them to come and go from MIF as they please.
Thursday, August 22nd
At Kuva/Uniarts, in collaboration with Myymälä 2
Will begin with a walk between Töölö Towers and Kuva.
Facilitator: Odun Orimolade / Lagos, Nigeria
Odun Orimolade is an artist, academic, and cultural practitioner who directs her work in trans-disciplinary approaches, research, and collaborations. She maintains an open contexture to her engagements, attending to a mix of ideologies and worldviews, frequently addressing the plausibility of thought, space and the intangible. This lends itself to investigations of human behavioral tendencies, orientation, and interaction as navigational mechanisms. She is interested in participatory research practices as an intervention into various spaces. Orimolade lectures in the Fine Art Department, Yaba College of Technology. She has served as coordinator for the UNESCO/UNEVOC center for research and sustainable development, Sub-Dean of the School of Art, Design, and Printing, and Curator of the Yusuf Grillo Gallery. She is Curatorial Director of the Yaba Art Museum. She organises the Annual Performance Art Intensive Workshop in Lagos. Orimolade is a Research Fellow of the College of Human Sciences, University of South Africa.
Workshop Offering: Memory mutations
The workshop offering nurses an idea about memory transplantation which would be apt coming into a new space. This hypothetical concept of transferring memories from one individual to another will be explored through the lenses of cognition, conation, and emotional regulation to understand its potential impact on navigating forms of shyness. The morphing and elusive characteristics of memory and memory making are interesting mechanisms for exploring ideas of shyness. The activities will involve an exploration of functions and pathways to engage diversities that impact us in new or other spaces and how they can be managed by understanding the processes in theories of action for learning, reflection and navigation.