Collections Take the Night Train
The present age is often described as being fragmented and nebulous, but our concept of reality underwent a series of fundamental changes already in the early twentieth century: psychoanalysis divided the human mind into the conscious and the subconscious, physics split the atom, and our view of the world was cut up into abstract pieces in art.
During its five years of existence, Kiasma has presented its collections under different themes and headings. The Night Train exhibition approaches the works from the framework of Surrealism. The exhibition title alludes to nocturnal moods, dreamlike states of mind and the unconscious layers of the mind. The thematic exhibition continues the tradition wherein contemporary art was most recently contrasted with art from the sixties and seventies and, before that, to Postmodernism in the eighties. From the flow of images, the current exhibition spotlights works whose connecting factors are compulsive beauty, the wonderful and the uncanny, and objective chance.
Surrealism and its legacy in art offer a broad front to approach the exhibition works. Early surrealists almost a hundred years ago had several things in common with contemporary artists. They were interested in disrupting ordinary perception and vision, utilising chance and the logic of dreams, and investigating the boundaries of and relationship between the mind and the body. They also shared an interest in primitive cultures, evolution and the combination of human and animal qualities.
The exhibition works also re-examine the concept of identity in many ways. Experiences of strangeness and fragmentation can easily disrupt a psyche balancing under internal and external pressures. Construction of identity has become one of many life-long projects for the contemporary human being. In her article, Riikka Stewen examines the effects of culture and history on an identity based on representational repetition. We could say that collecting identities has almost become a fashion for individuals and localities alike; no longer just the body, but the self, too, is something that is consciously built.
The presence of war is another link between those thinking about the purpose of art today and between the two World Wars. Surrealists wanted to change the world, to believe in the human capacity for good. War today is an expression of growing greed, and the innocence of a hundred years ago seems lost to us. For the surrealists, change began with the individual and continued in the aspiration for a society free from the control of power and violence. Changing the world through art was no simple matter even then, and the political stance eventually caused fragmentation within the group. Like many others, André Breton was most keen on overcoming the rulers inside the individual, breaking down the control of reason and overthrowing narrow-minded moral ideas.
The purpose of such liberation was to get in touch with the hidden logic of reality, with accidental beauty welling up from the unconscious. The photographs of Harri Larjosto can easily be seen as a continuation of this tradition. They can be examined from a variety of different angles, the exhibition theme providing only one connecting approach.
A real find is Julio Hernández’s Bedroom (1973), purchased from the 1974 ARS exhibition. Even as it opens up, the work presents a closed, dark scene of dramatic events, a nest of the traumas of love, birth and death. The surrealists, too, were interested in psychoanalysis and the concept of the unconscious, and Freud’s theories supported the emphasis on sexuality. Exceptional mental states such as hypnosis, psychosis and hallucinations were seen as fascinating clues to the hidden parts of the mind. Marjaana Kella’s photographic series of people under hypnosis and Marjatta Oja’s video work Interview allow visitors to take part in inner journeys and exceptional states of mind that cannot be expressed by verbal or visual means, but which are nevertheless within the circle of shared experiences. The religious and mystical experiences discussed by Marjatta Oja’s interviewee were also close to the Surrealists.
Otto Mäkilä’s poetic paintings from the thirties followed faithfully in the footsteps of the metaphysical wing of Surrealism. Mäkilä’s pantheistic view of nature offers consolation for the oppressing transience of life: for him, nature is ‘a living eternity within us’. Ulla Vihanta writes in the exhibition book how Mäkilä’s ‘spiritual Surrealism’ acquired dark tones of death and separation because of the war. Later on, Mäkilä told later on that he admired Max Ernst, one of the original surrealists, whose Genius of the Bastille is featured in the exhibition. As an artist, Otto Mäkilä felt he had a responsibility towards the age he was living in, for ‘groping ahead with intuition’, and he saw Ernst’s endeavour as a valuable contribution to this. In addition to paintings, the exhibition also features drawings by Mäkilä where his concept of a human being appears in a very contemporary way. In The Inner Men Mäkilä calls for humanity that inhabits an empty shell in solitude.
The topical worldview of Night Train is neither universal nor uniform, but it does offer food for thought on a shared journey, not away from, but towards reality. The exhibition works often include mirrors and objects that reflect back our gaze. Darkness must be met with caution, and the recognition of darkness outside of us requires that we see it also inside, by looking into a mirror.
Raisa Laurila-Hakulinen
Member of the exhibition team
