HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme
Art Sonje Project #7
Frontiers in Retreat / Edge Effects – Active Earth

Artists:
Elena Mazzi & Sara Tirelli
mirko nikolić
Tuomas A. Laitinen
Nabb+Teeri
Jaakko Pallasvuo

Curator:
Jenni Nurmenniemi

Frontiers in Retreat Learning Sessions Co-curators:
Bora Hong, Haeju Kim, Hyejin Yeo, Jenni Nurmenniemi & guests

Frontiers in Transition

The ‘Active Earth’ group show and public programme at Art Sonje Center is part of the exhibition series Edge Effects, organised by Frontiers in Retreat project (2013–2018). Its seven satellite exhibitions weave connections between geographically dispersed artistic processes that strive towards new understandings of ecological entanglements and transitions.

Ecology is about perspective, really. There is no such thing as ‘nature’ or ‘environment’ separate from human life, only the mesh of ecosystems and processes that we inhabit: affective, cognitive, symbolic, social, political, economic, and technological ecologies. It’s all entangled.

The artists in the Edge Effects: Active Earth exhibition, while imagining future bodies, biomes, and ways of being, tackle these enmeshed ecologies through syntheses of various materials, methods and philosophical registers.

The Seoul edition of the exhibition series focuses on co-dependencies between humans and other life forms. The conceptual key to the exhibition, reflected in the setup of the exhibition space, is ‘entanglement’ – ever-changing, knotty relations between all forms of matter. What emerges is a porous, pulsing and mutating ecosystem.

The public programme elaborates on and complicates the questions posed by the artworks through a series of discursive and performative learning sessions, whereas the archive opens up a curated selection of fragments from the Frontiers in Retreat project in various media.