Sauli Sirviรถโs new publication ๐จ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ โ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐โ brings together projects and works created by Sirviรถ in Helsinki, Paris, and New York in recent years. The photographs and other visual materials are accompanied by a text by ๐ ๐ถ๐ถ๐ป๐ฎ ๐๐๐ท๐ฎ๐น๐ฎ, sharing the same title as the book. This text delves into the vibrant world behind Sirviรถโs works:
The publication is made up of pages printed on a variety of papers and other materials. The printing is handcrafted using inkjet and laser printing, as well as Helsinki sunlight burning.
The book is published in a limited edition of 100 copies and will be released in parallel with the duo exhibition ๐ณ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ at SIC (30.11.2024โ19.1.2025) by ๐๐๐ถ๐๐ฎ ๐ฉ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐น๐ท๐ฒ๐๐ฎ and Sauli Sirviรถ.
UTU 022 โข ISBN 978-952-65274-4-4 โข 50 pages โข A4 โข Printed and bound in Helsinki 2024โข Edition of 100 copies.
๐จ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ โ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐โ is supported by Kone Foundation, Arts Promotion Centre Finland and Niilo Helander Foundation
An Odd Old Passageway at NSFW curated by Ida Lehtonen.
Exhibition text by the curator:
There is no such thing as an anachronism. Look inside your mind: does it contain only one era?[1]
The hands of the clock have stopped at MAI. The doors to the sleeping cars have disappeared a long time ago, but the code of the key cards remains intact. In the exhibition An Odd Old Passageway by the Finnish artist Sauli Sirviรถ a palimpsest of images and found materials turn time into wax.[2]
Photographs are the ground of Sirviรถโs work yet they donโt aim just to point to a moment frozen in time. The places he visits and documents and the materials he collects from them materialise as images and objects that fluctuate between different layers of time. Sirviรถ searches for spaces in a liminal state: hidden, in ruins, out of function, some soon to be demolished and lost forever. Materials, details, forms, and experiences found in these sites become sculptures and installations in an instant of synchronicity. Each piece follows its lifecycle with no absolute final form: sculptural components transform into new experiments or return to the hard infrastructure[3] to become new images and objects. In his latest work, Sirviรถ returns also to drawing. A book on the fire security of high-rise buildings[4] (High-Rise Security and Fire Life Safety by Geoff Craighead (2009), archival images from the Picture Collection,[5] among others, are drawn copies, copies of copies, that transcend the documentary and turn into fiction. [6]
In An Odd Old Passageway the past, the present, and the future cross paths in three metropolitan areas: in the utopia of Noisyle-Grand,[7] the mega infrastructure projects of Pasila,[8] and New Yorkโs high โcathedrals of commerceโ. [9] The ruins and the subterranean caches look skywards: the urban wastelands of old industrial areas and waterfronts are being disposed of at an accelerating pace making way for future high-rise buildings. Skyscrapers[10] have taken root deep down in the ground, but permanence is always fleeting. There will always be new ruins.[11]
โThat is what fascinates me about my sculptures, that they are really fragile, they are flaking all the time. However, that fragility can also be seen in the skyscrapers, it can be seen everywhere: it repeats the reality we are inโ.[12]
Aluminium, paper, silver, fibreglass, egg cartons, plastic, pencil, soil, plaster: the materials in Sirviรถโs installations and sculptures are organic, fragile, sometimes prone to mould, or on the other hand, toxic, even aggressive. โI like the chaotic side of it, I like being in trouble with my materials. You never know what willhappenโ, he laughs as we talk on Zoom. Chaos makes following the materials a natural part of the process. The materials reflect the ephemerality, oddness, and hazards in the places.
โIf you think of the city as a sculpture, then we are like inside a sculpture where things happen all the time. Houses flake, the sun corrodes their surfaces, and people produce information on papers that are shredded, some of it is secret, and it can be found on the streets. People come from outside of New York, along the ring roads, they flake and drop stuff, throwing things out of the car windows. I try to collect all that debris around me and figure out how it got thereโ.[13]
There is a duality to Sauli Sirviรถโs practice. Control and chaos, relics and waste, archival practices and vanishing information, preserving and destroying alternate in our conversations leading to the exhibition. Sirviรถ compares his work to archaeological excavations. At the same time, he uses the Finnish word louhinta, mining or extraction of sourcing materials for his work. Semantically, mining can refer to the โextraction of valuable geological materials and minerals from the surface of the Earthโ,[14] but also to searching through information for specific data or patterns.[15] The materials he extracts are not rare earth minerals as such, but rather debris, soil, and discarded everyday items and materials. The materials always embody information but where the modern archaeologist might build a narrative around the finds,[16] Sirviรถ follows the material to disjoint us, leaving the temporal dots unconnected. The work is dense in memories, but it is in the nature of memory to blur, change, and take new forms over time.[17] However, even when the images are obfuscated, dim, fragmentary, or only indicative of the original image, they always reveal something to us. Documenting the liminal places is a way to go back in time and remember them even after they are gone.[18] In itself, it is an act against the capitalist objective of forgetting.
Philosopher Tere Vadรฉn writes: Only in the landfill or on the waves of the sea will the true raw material of the capitalist product ideal be revealed: a universal shred that can be anything. It could have been anything and it could become anything.[19]
[1] Anne Carson in conversation with Niko Hallikainen. (2024, May 1)
art-2000010386231.html Quote translated from the interview. โSellaista asiaa kuin anakronismi ei ole olemassa. Katso omaan mieleesi: sisรคltรครคkรถ se vain yhden aikakauden?โ
[2] In the short story โAjan huoneโ the character Donna Quijote describes
time as wax. From Krohn, L. (1983) Donna Quijote ja muita kaupunkilaisia.
