Category: film

Commissioned by Kiasma for ARS17, Etsivä is both a part of and a film on ARS17. Taking at face value Virtual Reality’s promise to reproduce the world, the film plays with the tension between the experience of the exhibition and its representation in virtual reality. The soundtrack, inspired in Sigfried Kracauer’s Der Detektiv-Roman, highlights virtual reality’s positivist roots. The film will be available as part of ARS17+—the exhibition’s online section—creating a distance between the experience of the show at the museum and its experience on the film. Once the show has ended, Etsivä will remain as the most realistic documentation of what it was.

Milja Liimatainen writes in the ARS17 catalogue: “Straschnoy considers what happens when our physical contact with material objects decreases or ceases altogether. What happens to the work’s aura if the viewer only ever encounters its representation(s)?”

For more information on Axel Straschnoy please click here.

The Detective will be featured at ARS17 in Helsinki; and in Straschnoy’s solo exhibition Immersive Worlds at ECCENTRIC Art & Research in Milan in October 2017.

Also, Kiasma has recently announced the new acquisition of artworks for its collection.  Axel Straschnoy’s virtual reality film The Detective  is now part of the collection of the Finnish National Gallery.

To see the trailer on ARS17 website along with the other selected artists please click here.

For more information on Kiasma’s acquisitions please click here.

For more information on Axel Straschnoy please click here.

Kilpisjärvellä is a film for planetariums, and a photo series by Axel Straschnoy. It tells the story of 2 explorers who travel to north Lapland to record the Northern Lights. The film is shot in time lapse, with an extreme wide angle lens, which gives it a peculiar look.
The Northern Lights are an usual subject in planetariums. However, they are mostly treated in a scientific manner and the point of view of the camera recording them is abstract. Kilpisjärvellä presents the Northern Lights in the context in which they can be seen, including the nature, the weather and the time it takes to travel there.

Nordic Film Days Lübeck

The Nordic Film Days Lübeck, first presented by the Lübeck Film Club in 1956 and taken over by the Hanseatic City of Lübeck in 1971, has one of the longest traditions of any film festival worldwide. It is the only festival in Germany, and the only one in Europe, which is entirely devoted to the presentation of films from the North and Northeast of Europe.

Feature films, documentaries and short films from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden are presented at this five-day event every year at the beginning of November. In addition, there is an extensive children’s and youth film programme and a retrospective devoted to important eras, specific genres or famous persons of film history. The section Filmforum presents films from North Germany. Accompanying the film programme are seminars, discussions, roundtable talks, concerts and readings.

This year the Festival runs from November 2 through the 6.

For more information on Kilpisjärvellä screenings program please click here.

For more information on Axel Straschnoy please click here.