TEXTS
Kodista ja vieraasta Milla-Kariina Ojan taiteessa
(Katalogiteksti Turku biennaali 2015, Historian ja Nykytaiteen museo Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova)
Hanna Johansson, Nykytaiteen tutkija, taidehistorian dosentti, Helsingin yliopisto
On the intimacy of dwelling at the intersection of private and public space
(Article for the Parallel Interiors exhibition catalogue, 2014)
Hanna Johansson, Contemporary art researcher, docent in art history, University of Helsinki
HOME – PROJECT, Milla-Kariina Oja
(Article for the exhibition catalogue, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing, 2010)
Luca Zordan, Independent curator, PhD in Art History
Home Sweet Home
(Article for the Home-Project exhibition catalogue, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijjing, 2010)
Bérénice Angremy, independent curator and writer
Kodista ja vieraasta Milla-Kariina Ojan taiteessa
(Katalogiteksti Turku biennaali 2015, Historian ja Nykytaiteen museo Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova)
Hanna Johansson, Nykytaiteen tutkija, taidehistorian dosentti, Helsingin yliopisto
Milla-Kariina Ojan teokset lähestyvät asumista ja kodin tilan tekemistä nykyisessä globaalissa maailmassa. Asuminen näyttäytyy Ojan elokuvissa yksityisen paikan hakemisena maailmassa, jossa julkinen, ohjeistettu ja kontrolloitu sosiaalinen tila määrittelee yhä enemmän ihmisten arjen tilankäytön ja toiminnan ehtoja.
Ojan elokuvat muistuttavat siitä, että asuminen on ihmisen tapa olla maailmassa, kuten saksalainen filosofi Martin Heidegger ajattelee. Heideggerin mukaan vain jos osaamme asua, kykenemme rakentamaan, ja vain jos osaamme asua voimme ajatella. Tätä seuraten Ojan teokset etsivät myös paikkaa ajattelulle, ja ihmisenä olemisen tekemiselle. Etymologisesti asua sanan alkuperä on sanassa buan, joka tarkoittaa kirjaimellisesti paikallaoloa. Heideggerin asumiseen, rakentamiseen ja ajatteluun liittyvät metaforat korostavat asumista ja kodin tilaa ihmisen olemisen perustana, joka suojaa meitä ihmisiä odottamattomia vieraita vastaan.1
Ojan elokuva In conversation with Seven Flowers and Others on nykypäivän miljöömuotokuva, jossa seurataan nuoren kiinalaisnaisen askareita hänen omassa huoneessaan ja parvekkeella yhden päivän aikana. Parallel Interiors taas johdattaa katsojan kolmen rinnakkaisen valkokankaan kautta kolmeen kaupunkiin, kolmeen maanosaan ja kolmeen kieleen. Näemme rinnakkain asetetuista projisoinneista rakennetun panoraaman pekingiläisen pientalon sisäpihalta asukkaineen. Intervallikuvauksen ansiosta aika tiivistyy ja katsoja näkee sisäpihan tapahtumia päivän kuluessa. Ihmiset palaavat jostain, kulkevat pihan kautta sisälle taloon, sytyttävät valot, tekevät askareitaan, viihtyvät. Vähitellen kiinalainen talo muuttuu helsinkiläiseksi kaupunkiasunnoksi, jonka ikkunoista näkyy toisien talojen ikkunoita ja asukkaita. Kuva siirtyy myöhemmin New Yorkin kaupunkitalojen fasadeihin, kaupungin massiiviseen siluettiin, kunnes palaa takaisin Pekingiin, asuintalon suljetulle tyhjälle pihalle. Parallel Interiors on eräänlainen maailmanympärimatka ihmisten arjen julkisuudelta kätkettyihin asumisen tiloihin.
Ojan teosten merkitykset syntyvät paikan, asumisen ja erilaisten kulttuurien synnyttämistä murtumista ja eroista. Näissä teoksissa ei aluksi tunnu olevan tilaa odottamattomalle vieraalle, pikemminkin ne näyttävät vahvistavan ajatusta kodista rauhan ja läsnäolon tyyssijana. Falling House luo kuitenkin hyvin toisenlaisen näköalan. Siinä seurataan vanhan kaksikerroksisen asuintalon tuhoamista, kauhakuormaajan mielivaltaista rakennuksen repimistä, ja lopulta talon romahdusta. Kauhakuormaaja näyttäytyy rakentamisen vastakohtana, väkivaltaisena ja kutsumattomana tunkeutujana. Falling house kiinnittää huomion kaupungin asuntopolitiikan asujia kohtaan harjoittamaan näkymättömään valtaan.
Ojan uusi Odottamaton vieras -näyttelyssä nähtävä teos Tummien verhojen takana lumi näyttää valkeammalta käsittelee sekin asumista ja rakentamista koskevaa rakenteellista väkivaltaa. Tällä kertaa se näyttäytyy käsityönä tehtyjen puuasuintalojen autioitumisena ja rapistumisena. Teos ottaa kiinni tehorakentamisen syrjäyttämän asumismuodon vaimenevista varjoista ja etsii näille taloille vaihtoehtoisia kertomuksia. Nytkin unohdetuilla paikoilla käy odottamaton vieras.
Oikeastaan mikään Ojan elokuvista ei ole viaton, runollinen tarina kodista. Tai tämä on vain yksi puoli teosten esittämästä asumisesta. Toinen puoli taas dekonstruoi kodin tilan, avaa sen tuntemattomien katseille sekä kulttuurisille ja inhimillisille eroille. Oja näyttää kodin sisältävän lähtökohtaisesti jo jälkiä vieraasta, kulttuurisia haavoja ja väkivallan siemeniä. Odottamaton vieras astuu Ojan teoksien kodin tiloihin monta kertaa. Ensiksi taiteilija itse kameransa kanssa hakeutuu tirkistelyasentoon; seuraamaan ihmisten arkea näkymättömänä sivussa. Toisaalta odottamaton vieras on katsoja, joka hetkittäin kokee itsensä melkein tunkeilevaksi vieraaksi toisen kotona. Lisäksi odottamaton vieras näyttää Ojan teoksissa olevan elokuvissa esitetyt kielelliset, kulttuuriset, ajalliset ja sosiaaliset yhteentörmäykset, jotka muovaavat sitä miten asetumme ja asetamme kodin tilaa.
Oja ei siis jatkakaan Heideggerin käsitystä asumisesta olemisen vakaana läsnä olevana turvana vaan päinvastoin rikkoo tämän hienovaraisesti teostensa rakenteessa. Itse asiassa on oikeampi sanoa, että Ojan teokset osallistuvat intiimin kodin tilan dekonstruktioon, sillä ne päästävät vieraan kodin sisälle, näyttämällä kodin tilan olevan aina jo lähtökohtaisesti yhteydessä sen ulkopuoliseen todellisuuteen.2
1
Heidegger, Martin 1971, s. 148–160. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper Collins.
2
Ranskalainen filosofi Jacques Derrida on purkanut Heideggerin tila-ajattelua tähän suuntaan. Kodin tilan dekonstruktiosta kt. esimerkiksi Wigley, Mark 1997. The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Back to MenuOn the intimacy of dwelling at the intersection of private and public space
(Article for the Parallel Interiors exhibition catalogue, 2014)
Hanna Johansson, Contemporary art researcher, Docent in Art History, University of Helsinki
"What does intimate space mean to people in today´s world, where identity more and more rarely is formed based on the location where one lives" is a question raised in the press release of Milla-Kariina Oja´s exhibition Parallel Interiors. With this topic in mind the artist has been interviewing people over the course of few years in China, Finland and New York. Upon completion of the interviews she produced three video pieces, which discuss concepts of home, settling down and belonging in these three cultures.
The main work in the exhibition, a video installation entitled Parallel Interiors, takes the viewer via three parallel cinema screens into three different cities, three continents and three languages. The projections, placed side by side, initially show us a panorama view into a Beijing courtyard, where a woman is sitting resting on an outdoor chair. By means of interval photography time is condensed and we see the events in the courtyard over the course of the day. People come back from somewhere, they walk through the courtyard into the house, turn on the lights, move around the kitchen and courtyard, prepare dinner, play ping pong and go about their things. Gradually the home in the image changes into an old, almost empty city flat in Helsinki; through its windows we see windows of other houses and in them their inhabitants. Later still the image moves to the facades and windows of townhouses in New York and to the silhouette of the city, until it returns back to Beijing, into the small, closed and empty courtyard of a residential house. The rays of the sun move from surface to surface and the flying fluff heads of the flowers accumulate in to the empty corners of the courtyard. The three-channel video work is a kind of round the world trip into scenes of people´s ordinary daily lives. The structure of the work, in which we slowly move from one place to another, engenders an experience of being simultaneously here and there.
The Parallel Interiors exhibition has two other single channel video works, which also reflect upon the notions of houses, home, dwelling and belonging to a place. While the three-channel video installation is clearly the main work in the exhibition, the two other works reinforce and particularize the point of view, making the exhibition complete.
Falling House shows the destruction of a two-storey residential building. An orange digger tears down the load-bearing walls of a building. Finally the house collapses to the ground. Inevitably the work brings to mind the art of the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) and especially the project and film Conical Intersect (1975), that was realised inside a house that was dismantled in order to make room for the Centre Pompidou. At the end of the film a digger bites into the walls of the house and they start to fall and crumble to the land surrounding the house and to the street. Both Oja´s and Matta-Clark´s depictions of mechanical violence towards residential buildings appear as societal indifference to people´s daily lives, the lived history of the dwellings and the layers of memory pertaining to them. Matta-Clarks´s building cuts have been related to Criticism of the American middleclass lifestyle and its model of the home. In this home formed around a nuclear family, the woman and the mother has been placed within the private protection of the domestic space, while the father has influence within the public space by going to work outside of home. The feminists, who objected to this idea of a home born with the bourgeoisie, later even abandoned the whole idea of home as a permanent refuge and a haven of safety. Home is not limited only to the traditional model of the middleclass nuclear family, but actualises by countless different ways. For me, Milla-Kariina Oja´s works emphasize the diverse nature of home and the act of dwelling, and the local, individual and cultural forming of the notion of home.
Falling House shows the facades of a dwelling and their crumbling from the outside. The artwork doesn´t talk about the inhabitants, neither does it raise questions about their experiences. However, In Conversation with Seven Flowers and Others shows the viewer a more intimate side of dwelling. The video work is like of a present day milieu portrait. The setting is a classical depiction of the interior, with light and greenness entering only from the balcony door situated at the rear of the image. The image follows the daily routines of a young Chinese woman in her own room and balcony over the course of one day, from daytime till night, until the dark. The woman performs ordinary daily tasks; waters plants, drinks tea, irons some dresses, lights up a cigarette and browses on an iPad. Occasionally she leaves the room to go maybe to the kitchen, bathroom or perhaps outside, but shortly she returns. She lives alone and enjoys her home. Alongside the gestures of the woman we hear about little incidences related to the subject of home taken from the stories of the interviewees. Intimate spaces allow secrets to be shared, as agreements made in public can be broken, but concerning this young woman it´s more about space, in which to take action, regain strength and work.
The works are shot using time-lapse photography, which enables Oja to show events of a longer duration over just a few minutes as a direct shot without cuts. At the same time following the events in detail is impossible, and as the viewer is kept at a certain distance from them, so he or she doesn´t get a feeling of intruding upon the private life of the young woman. The sentences selected from the interviews carried out by Oja, flow over the images in both works, Parallel Interiors and In Conversation with Seven Flowers and Others. The relation between the text and the image stays at a level of a suggestion but directs the eye towards certain details of the images such as the windows, doors, chairs, walls, the walls around the courtyard and so on.
These detached sentences do not form a full story and they are not directly connected to the images, but yet they clearly relate to home, dwelling and the mood of a place. They talk about belonging at home and not belonging at home, about homesickness, details of one´s home, leaving, losing of a home and atmospheres related to home. As these fragments of thoughts, the sentences function more on the level of the rhythm between the content´s words and the phonetic and embodied meanings. Three languages take turns and thus emphasize language as one of the elements in feeling oneself to be at home. According to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, human beings exist in the world specifically to dwell, and for him this dwelling reveals and manifests itself in language. Thus the human being dwells, besides in ones body, room, house, city, country and the world, also in one´s mother tongue, which is both interior, intimate and private, also public, shared and communal.
Parallel Interiors doesn´t only show corresponding interiors in different cities, cultures and countries, but offers the idea that the interior and exterior space are overlapping in such a way that one starts to think about the cityscape as a kind of an interior. While listening to the poetic sentences of the film in different languages, I start to understand my own language as an intersection between the shared exterior world and my mind´s interior. I carry my language wherever I go.
The Parallel Interiors exhibition traces private space through the exteriors of homes. At the same time it opens up the physical space of a home, house or an apartment towards a wider set of readings related to the mind, feelings, memories and bodily gestures. In the exhibition, home and the act of dwelling are approached through the constructed environment and through its material limits that define private and public. At the same time the works show that home is not only defined by the exterior walls, doors and windows, but also made actively by living in the space. In addition, the border between the public space and the private home doesn´t always follow that of the building; the borders of one´s own private space are actually the results of many negotiations and are changeable. For example, with increasing urbanization people´s need for privacy has increased, but the space required for that instead has diminished.
Oja´s exhibition assures that there is still a need for us to feel at home and for there to be intimate, private space, everywhere in the world. Maybe home is the space where one gathers oneself together and becomes ready to change and grow, as one of the people Oja interviewed suggests: "When I come home I want to be peaceful, silent, like if I was living with a plant...they grow, I grow."
Back to MenuHOME – PROJECT, Milla-Kariina Oja
(Article for the exhibition catalogue, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing, 2010)
Luca Zordan, Independent curator, PhD in Art History
At her solo exhibition in March 2010 at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing, Finnish artist Milla-Kariina Oja presents a series of photographs and videos realized during these past two years.
In the three videos, shot in the Mongolian desert, in tropical Guanxi, and on a frozen lake in Finland, the camera is fixed, presenting an immobile landscape and depicting a nature which is slow, if not immutable, in its changes. Isolated landscapes. In these images, the human presence is almost absent, yet perceivable. You can feel it in the footprints in the desert sand, in the houses on the horizon line of the arctic landscape, and in the cultivated vegetation of the tropical land.
The same anonymity and undefined feeling of the videos are present in the thirteen photographs: still landscapes, uneventful, without any specificity, and almost abandoned. None of them depict urban cities, but a couple, eventually reveal, remote suburbs. Also here, the human presence is always perceivable, even if not clearly visible. Looking at the photos, we can not tell where in the world the places are located. Only in one photograph can you see it is in China, as it presents a small village of Chinese houses up in the mountains. All the others could be places of nowhere, as they are so non-specific. They are non-landscapes; they become metaphysical spaces.
In each photograph appears a small presence, that of a house in different colors (white, red, or transparent), which Milla-Kariina has built each time in the places that she visited. It is a geometric structure made out of a wooden frame, which at times is covered with fabric. It is 2.20 meters high, meant to allow a person to stand inside. It is flexible and movable, like a tent. It is fragile, light, and even transparent, to the point that, in some photos, the house even disappears into the landscape. It is almost not visible, impalpable, as if it could be blown away by the wind at any time. In Milla-Kariina's photographs, the house is often placed in the middle of the image, in a space where it should be most visible. Yet it often seems to disappear. Like an igloo, the house does not alter the landscape where it sits; it can only try to be mimetic and adapt to its surrounding environment.
The house-structure was constructed by the artist when she arrived in China. "Beijing was so crowded with people. Everywhere there were buildings under construction," Milla-Kariina says, "I couldn't find places to shoot. I was looking for empty and quiet spaces, going to the parks, .. and at one point I was even trying to shoot during the night , because then there were no people. This is how I started to think about 'one's own space' ".
"If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace." Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space, 1958)
Having left Finland after high-school, Milla-Kariina Oja studied photography and art in Manchester (UK), Castilla-La Mancha and Barcelona (Spain). Away from Finland since 1996, she has lived in many different places until moving to Beijing in 2006, where she currently lives.
Where is home for the artist? Why home-project? What is home?
Home is not necessarily a solid building grounded on the floor. For the artist, home can be a flexible structure, even transferable, almost transparent, which is, in open relation with the surrounding environment. Home is something movable, precarious and adaptable to different circumstances. In fact, Milla-Kariina's work suggests that home might not be a physical space. Her impalpable and undefined landscapes are nowhere places, everybody's home; spaces of the soul. Home is, for the artist, an impalpable receptacle of experiences, memories, and imagination, which is, in open dialogue and relation with the surrounding cultural and natural environment.
Milla-Kariina's works allow us to reflect on the relationship between human beings and nature. They suggest that human beings could only successfully make their way in this world by living in harmony with nature. Human beings are part of an environment which can not be totally controlled. It is important not to destroy and harm nature, but to become aware of the limits of our power over nature, learn that we are part of a whole, and exist as individuals intimately interconnected both to all other matter in the cosmos and to all other life on Earth. Understanding which place human beings occupy in the nature, and their relation with the universe of things, is one of the fundamental questions for mankind.
It is particularly interesting to see this work now, in a China that is at its peak of real estate development and construction. In the history of urban development, few cities have changed as quickly or as radically as in China in these years. Skyscrapers, offices complexes, shopping malls, hotels and high-rise apartment complexes have appeared everywhere. During these four years spent in China, the attention of the artist has not been driven by the iconic buildings of internationally renowned architects, nor by the rapid pace of industrialization, nor by the new constructions spread all around the cities. On the contrary, her photographs present to us a journey of personal and intimate respect for nature, the environment and cultural heritage.
In Milla-Kariina Oja's works, there emerges a strong sense of how overwhelming the power of nature is, and how fragile the essence of humanity is, totally surrounded by an unrestrained and mysterious nature.
Back to MenuHome Sweet Home
(Article for the Home-Project exhibition catalogue, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijjing, 2010)
Bérénice Angremy, Independent curator and writer
Just prior to the opening day of Milla-Kariina Oja's exhibition at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, just a few kilometres away from Caochangdi some Chinese artists had, without any direct link, been unexpectedly evicted from their studios - their workplace, their living space, in other words, their "homes". On a hectic day, public security forces encircled Caochangdi art centres and galleries for fear that things could get out of hand if the artists were to gather in protest. The air was heavy with a subdued tension, which gradually died away within the exhibition. In the rooms of Three Shadows, Milla-Kariina's houses floated like strange coloured ghosts in deserted landscapes and took on a more vindictive meaning, all the while acting as visual reminders of the fragile nature of the concept of "home".
It would of course be too restrictive to limit the importance of Milla-Kariina's work to mention of one trivial event in China, where evictions are a common occurrence, but the exhibition is certainly a poignant reminder that the notion of a home – one's own physical and spiritual space – is both human and personal. Home-Project, a series of 13 photographs and three videos, attempts to address this feeling of being home, one that is practically impossible to define, despite us living in a world, which revolves around it. It is easy to forget that it took centuries for some peoples and classes to experience the sense of freedom that comes with finding one's own "home". When, at the beginning of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own, the bedroom walls symbolised centuries of women's struggle to enjoy a freedom that still hadn't quite been realised. When Milla-Kariina photographs "her" houses while travelling, she evokes the freedom to adapt to migrations, but also the fragility of the feeling found therein.
Milla-Kariina started by marking out a clearly defined space, a house drawn exactly like a child would draw it, made up of four sides and a pointed roof. Without windows nor doors, the structure was nonetheless so instantly recognisable as to melt almost invisibly into its surrounding. Milla-Kariina then began to take her house away with her. At first, she photographed a miniature version in a space that looked like it could well have been the bedroom of her childhood, and the photograph looked just like a memento. It was then transformed into a "human-sized" house, which Milla-Kariina has transported from landscape to landscape. The photographs are in colour and the chosen landscapes are of an almost magical beauty, with just a hint of nostalgia. The artist carries us through the forests and lakesides of her native Finland; then through the contradictory landscapes of China, where she has been living for the last four years, from the deserts of Inner Mongolia and mountain villages of Hebei, to the construction sites on the fringes of Beijing. Milla-Kariina always insists on photographing deserted places, no doubt as a means of identifying with Finland, a country with 5 million inhabitants stretched out over huge swathes of land, which seem deserted when compared with China. Never a single figure, and yet, nothing but humanity! In the end, no matter whether in China or in Finland, it is the spirit and soul of a place that make and break up the landscape. A sense of this is amplified tenfold thanks to three videos that present the same landscapes but in which the houses have completely disappeared. Milla-Kariina brings us back to its essence: we are the ones who give space its meaning.
Milla-Kariina Oja already addressed the theme of how humans relate to space in one of her earlier works, Cat's Cradle (2005), which, with characteristic poetry, analysed the relationship between several people. Cat's Cradle is a game using string that can be played with many hands at once and which consists of creating a shape between fingers. Incidentally, it is also the name of a song [Cat's in the Cradle], which sings about the vicissitudes of a relationship between a father and his maturing son. We are masters of the string with which we play, but can't stop the string getting entangled. There was a certain performative quality to the people who acted out Cat's Cradle which, quite contrary to expectations, we rediscover in the albeit static photographs of Home-Project. The houses have replaced the people and appear to be floating, even dancing, within the spaces.
The photographs in Home-Project are much more intimate than the sobriety of their settings might suggest. They are like a journal, which describes the geographical movements and ambiguous feelings connected with the artist's migrations. We can't really believe in the safety of these houses made of wooden canes that look like they could be blown away with the slightest gust of wind. Neither the red and white fabric that sometimes covers them, nor the beauty of the landscape that at other times surrounds them succeed in giving the houses a sense of stability. Despite this, the poetry that emanates from the photographs conjures up more the dream of being able to fit into the landscape, than the fear of being unable to stay.
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