Aily Nash and Jaakko Pallasvuo – Screening and Talk
Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland
AUGUST 25, 2017, 4–6PM, FREE ENTRY
As part of her MOBIUS Fellowship at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, New York-based curator Aily Nash, in collaboration with artist Jaakko Pallasvuo, will present three moving image works that connect to forms, intentions and ideas in Pallasvuo's latest video, Filter (2017). Filter is preoccupied with nostalgia, cultural and historical debt, and the mechanisms and institutions of filmmaking, and formally investigates the essay format. The work sprung from a wish to make an analogue essay film, but it ended up being shot mostly on an iPad app simulating 8mm film grain, laughing nervously at itself.
"The ‘essay’ signifies ‘an attempt.’ [...] Risk is inherent in any trial or attempt, and hence the essayist 'goes under cover', we might say, in various guises of fictionality.” – Denise Gigante
Along with Jaakko Pallasvuo's Filter, the program of the screening includes MARY HELENA CLARK's The Dragon is the Frame (2014), JAMES N. KIENITZ WILKINS's Indefinite Pitch (2016) and STEVE REINKE's Joke (Version One) (1991). All of which, through their own approaches to the essay mode, illustrate a formal awareness of what it means to produce images today. The Dragon is the Frame is described by Clark as an “experimental detective film,” while the narrator of Indefinite Pitch carries traces of the hard-boiled protagonists of 1940s Film Noir. Joke (Version One) unfolds as a mystery of mistaken identity and death. Maybe these works could be categorized as essay films, and maybe essay films are whodunits where the murderer is never caught.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with Pallasvuo and Nash.
The event is organized in collaboration with the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York's MOBIUS Fellowship Program. The transatlantic program enables collaboration and projects for visual arts professionals and organizations. Aily Nash's MOBIUS partner in Helsinki is Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art.