Creepy Crawlies! This is Cute!
Children took over Kiasma on Upside Down day in March and, true to carnival tradition, roles were reversed. Children from Vironniemi day care centre shared their views on artworks in the ARS 06 exhibition and asked the audience tricky questions.
Drawings by Chloe Piene inspired 5-year-old Matias to tell a story about a skeleton and its human friend, progressing from one picture to another.
Suvi interpreted Walter Martin and Paloma Muños’s work, in which a miniature man and woman, chained together by the ankles with their backs turned to each other, inhabit a snow globe. "Here we have a happy love story. They have chains so that they would stay together." Her friend in turn authoritatively explained how the sculpture Sex I by Jake and Dinos Chapman, in which bugs have eaten people to skeletons, is made of expensive bronze and that the artists made it for ARS because there was nothing else scary in the exhibition. Alongside, a knee-high little girl was whooping. "Creepy crawlies! This is cute!"
The little contact guide Nanouk stood by Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger’s Swan Lake and wondered, "Why is the cat swimming in the pond?"
Shadow dance
Slightly older children held art workshops. A joint workshop of the Vantaa Art School and Vantaa Dance Institute played with shadows. They performed a fierce shadow battle on the work Last Riot by the group AES+F projected on a large sheet. In addition, twigs and hay became shadow art, there was shadow dancing and volunteers from the crowd were given new clothes with the help of an overhead projector.
The workshop by Espoo Art School, in turn, examined the ARS theme of good and evil by constructing a work of art from chains of words by workshop participants, discussing moral issues.
Lift to Happiness (Out of Order)
The audience was also asked to invent new titles for works in the ARS 06 exhibition. The installation Security on Site by the Spanish group El Perro became Pseudo security, Lift to Happiness (Out of Order) and Prison. Angelo Filemeno’s embroidery Stardust became Eagle Claws, Tear of Death, Skull and Don’t Try This at Home. Swan Lake inspired numerous suggestions for a new title, including Scrap Heap, The Innocent, Spoiled Nature, The Black Sea, The Contradiction of Purity, Beautified Mass Murder and The Beginning of the End.
Kiasma Theatre hosted three performances by the orchestra Äänima Jänis, which sang, and made the audience sing familiar children’s songs from back to front, sung and played from the end to the beginning with astonishing skill. "Sdnah ruoy palc, ti wonk uoy dna yppah er’uoy fi…"
Lunch break was the best
During the day, the children gave many an insightful, arresting and, sometimes, to adult ears, unorthodox comment. It was wonderful to see with what an open and unprejudiced mind the children related to the artworks and making art – though after some initial nervousness.
And how truthful their replies were to questions put to them. For instance, Ahti, a small boy who got a bit tired towards the end of his shift described being a contact guide, "It’s pretty hard because you have to talk all the time. The lunch break was the best part."
That is how it is, being a guide surely is not always easy even for grown-ups. Indeed, we owe a big round of applause to all the children who made upsidedown day the success it was!
Jonna Strandberg
