The Art of Acts and Space

OPEN I was a happening organised in summer 1984 by six young art students, in which painting and installations were combined with performance and environmental art. Nowadays the event would be called social art. The group invited the public to their home, a small red cottage with a yard. The happening was based on the group’s collective preparation and work and on the sharing of experiences with the general public. Group members apart from the Lea and Pekka Kantonen were Heidi Tikka, Tarja Pitkänen, Juha Saitajoki and Iris Koistinen.

Open II , which took place in 1986-7, continued the communality approach, but with new emphases. The group, joined at this point by Katri and Jouni Pirttijärvi and Ami Hyvärinen, decided to carry out the next project in the Norwegian Laskelv wilderness, which the Kantonens had visited earlier. In Lapland the group put on performances partly prepared in advance. The photographic and video material recorded from these was presented later at the Open II, Eye of God exhibition.

The OPEN group’s performances and exhibitions opened up borders in many directions: the individual became mutual, life became art, performance became real – and vice versa. Communality, the interaction between the creators and the public, and also the relationship of man towards the holy, nature and religion were the issues being dealt with. The boundaries between different types of art also blurred still further. The group’s performances were the forerunners of political and social art, and anticipated their later projects. For example the Tent project initiated by the Kantonens among the Tarahumara Indians, the Setus and the Sami is still continuing.

The Acts of Art and Space exhibition is part of Kiasma’s Nordic Postmodernism collection display. It presents a slice of the history of Finnish performance and environmental art from the 1980s. It was at this time that the forms of making art began to rapidly exceed their traditional boundaries: conceptual art, spatial and environmental art, process art, video art and other new forms began to dominate the field in Finland as elsewhere. The presentation of art moved outside of museums and galleries to increasingly marginal places. Artists discovered abandoned factories and warehouses, wasteland, forests, mountains and marshes. The human body too became a place, medium and subject for art.

The Art of Acts and Spaceisthe story of the OPEN groupand the trip to Northern Norway which preceded its birth. On show are documents from three separate projects, linked partly by the same participants, but also by continuity of content and method of realisation. The exhibition begins in 1981 at the river Reisa in northern Norway and ends with the 1987 OPEN II Eye of God exhibition and presentation.

The exhibition focuses its gaze on a small but significant part of the decade’s events. The OPEN group condensed into their performances something essential of the phenomena of the time.

The Art of Acts and Space
Documentaries on performance and environmental art of the 1980s
Room X: 3 November 2000 – 21 January 2001