Tag: Axel Straschnoy

The Permian Projects

The Natural History Museum is a place where life and death mingle, where to celebrate life, we kill, a place where the variety of life can only be appreciated dead. The Permian was one of the most biodiverse periods in the history of Earth but ended with the worst mass extinction. In the regional museum in Perm, even more than in any other museum of natural history, life and death coexist.

These projects are conceived as artistic interventions into the existing museum practices, drawing ways of working, aesthetics and conceptual frameworks from the institution itself.

The Permian Collection

The Permian Collection is a collection of the insects exterminated as part of Perm Regional Museum’s conservation efforts.

These are regularly exterminated and disposed of without much afterthought. Focused on the nature-out-there, the Museum fails to consider itself as a place overrun by living beings, some of which might work against its stated mission of heritage conservation.

At artist’s request, the Museum began collecting the insect it kills, rounding up in half a year over 200 from 35 different families of Arthropoda. The new collection includes butterflies, mosquitos but also spiders and woodlice. The collected insects have been scientifically defined with the support of entomologists of Perm University, catalogued, photographed and placed in custom-made boxes, becoming the first new entomology collection since 2008.

The Dioramas of the Permian Museum

The Dioramas of the Permian Museum is a tridimensional photo series portraying the zoological collection’s animals in their new habitat: the museum storage.

Since the 1960s, the Perm Regional Museum used to have several dioramas in its displays. After moving venue in 2007, these were dismantled and their parts put into storage. The taxidermied animals that were part of them currently inhabit a former office, crowded in unlikely combinations that span biotopes and predator-prey relationships.

Many of these animals, collected when they were typical for the region, have become endangered. Some have gone extinct. The biotopes that the dioramas’ painted backgrounds depicted have in many cases ceased to exist. For many of the animals in the Museum’s Zoological collection, the storage itself has become their natural habitat, the only place they can still be found.

Axel Straschnoy’s work has been supported by a State Grant for Artists from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland. His residency at the museum was supported by the Vladimir Potanin Foundation. The projects were co-produced by the Perm Regional Museum and Kolme Perunaa.

For further information on Axel Straschnoy, please click here.

Axel Straschnoy is artist in residence at Grenna Museum – Polar Center during September 2018.

Axel Straschnoy has a specific interest in S. A. Andrée’s Polar Expedition and will immerse himself in the collections. In conjunction to his stay, he will give a talk on Tuesday 11 September at 6.30 pm

Under the heading “The Graphic Method” he will speak about his previous work and what fascinates with him about polar expeditions.

The lecture is given in English and free of charge.

Artist in Residence in collaboration with Nya Smaland. The conversation is organised with ART TALKS with support of Culture and Development, Region Jönköping County.

For more information about the artist please click here.

Axel Straschnoy wins the Feature Expanded 2017 SUB-TI Award

AWARDS FEATURE EXPANDED 2017

SUB-TI Award
> Axel Straschnoy with the film project Argentine from Helsinki,

which “addresses the issue of alienation through Horacio’s language and cultural challenges, an Argentinian who moved to Finland, who, when his existence is about to collapse, is forced to decide who he is and what he wants from life.”

Feature Expanded Distribution Award
> Janis Rafa with the film project Kala-a-zar 

Feature Expanded Development Award
>Assaf Gruber with the film project The Conspicuous Parts

ottod’Ame Film Award
> Pauline Curnier Jarden with the film project $eba$tiano Blu

FEATURE EXPANDED: European Art Film Strategies is a training program specifically designed to provide knowledge, methodologies and skills necessary for filmmakers with a background in visual arts to develop and produce feature films.

Feature Expanded is directed by Leonardo Bigazzi (Lo schermo dell’arte Film Festival) and Professor Sarah Perks (HOME).

Feature Expanded 2017 Jury, consisting of Marietta von Hausswolff von Baumgarten, Heinz Peter Schwerfel and Yorgos Tsourgianis, awarded 4 awards for the development, promotion and distribution of 4 film projects produced by the 12 participants in the third edition of the project training in collaboration with HOME, supported by Creative Europe Media and directed by Leonardo Bigazzi and Sarha Perks:

FEATURE EXPANDED 3rd edition

21 – 26 June 2017, HOME, Manchester
on-line sessions July – October
15 – 19 November 2017, Lo schermo dell’arte, Florence.

For more information on the program please click here.

For more information on Axel Straschnoy please click here.

Gabriele Di Matteo, Questo quadro forse Vi aiuterà a vedere meglio, 1994. Olio su tela, 129 x 70 cm.

Anja Puntari’s project Kit Flowknow  will be presented on October 13 in Venice.

During the last five years, Anja Puntari has extended her artistic research to the field of business, especially business coaching. In the context of this aspect of her investigation, she developed Flowknow, a methodology that uses the artistic approach and artworks for facilitating business coaching; and the Flowknow Cards are tools to apply this approach.

For the Flowknow Cards of Emotions, produced by Performant in collaboration with ECCENTRIC Art & Research, Puntari invited eleven artists from ECCENTRIC: Ivana Adaime Makac, Camilla Alberti, Tomislav Brajnović, Sarah Ciracì, Gabriele Di Matteo, Federico Luger,  Brian Montuori, Anja Puntari, Axel Straschnoy e Massimiliano Viel ; and one invited artist, Teresa Capasso, to feature 3 to 6 images of their works in the cards. The images have been selected by Gabriela Galati together with the artists, and the whole Kit includes also a dictionary of competences (from a previous deck of cards), a glossary of the emotions of this deck, and a catalogue with all the works and images featured on the cards.

The project will be presented on October 13 at Tese dei Soppalchi dell’Arsenale, Venezia.

Per maggiori informazioni su Flowknow e la presentazione si prega di cliccare qui.

Per maggiori informazioni su Anja Puntari si prega di cliccare qui.

Axel Straschnoy has been selected to participate of Feature Expanded, 3rd edition.

FEATURE EXPANDED: European Art Film Strategies is a training program specifically designed to provide knowledge, methodologies and skills necessary for filmmakers with a background in visual arts to develop and produce feature films.

Feature Expanded is directed by Leonardo Bigazzi (Lo schermo dell’arte Film Festival) and Professor Sarah Perks (HOME).

FEATURE EXPANDED 3rd edition

21 – 26 June 2017, HOME, Manchester
on-line sessions July – October
15 – 19 November 2017, Lo schermo dell’arte, Florence.

For more information on the program please click here.

For more information on Axel Straschnoy please click here.

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.

Axel Straschnoy‘s project Recovered Utopias has been selected by m-cult for its spring Collaborative Media Arts Projects.

Straschnoy describes the work as follows: “Recovered Utopias connects some of the youngest with some of the oldest residents of Maunula in a collaborative project that provides the younger generations with a new way of looking at the future.
For Recovered Utopias I will take advantage of the high proportion of senior inhabitants in Maunula as well as the presence of a high school specialised in science—and with an interest in art—to bring two very different age groups together. High school students from Helsingin Matematiikkalukio will interview retired people (possibly but not necessarily from the Helander Foundation’s old people home) about the perceptions and ideas they had of Martian colonisation as children. During the project, they will work to create images that answer to the descriptions they have heard. These images could be produced, for example, as films (animated or shot) or as 3D printed models. The working process is not linear but implies the active collaboration of the interviewed people in a context of constant discussion.
In the process of transmitting their vision of Martian travel, the older participants will transfer some of their sense of wonder and expectation, some of the ideas of the future as a brighter place that we all need to build together.”

Recovered Utopias is part of Destination Mars, a long-term research project on the ideological world surrounding current plans for the colonisation of Mars. The project allows us to rethink Earth ecology, our understanding of urbanism and housing (including the social constructs they presuppose), the rise of a technocratic mindset, and the encounter with radical otherness in a way akin to Columbus’s discovery of America in 1492.

For more information on m-cult please click here.

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.

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.

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

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

For more information on Axel Straschnoy please click here.

Mentre prepariamo la nostra prossima mostra, potete sfogliare e scaricare il catalogo di Naturalia et artificialia in versione digitale dalla nostra pagina (per il momento, in italiano, in English coming soon!):

Scaricare direttamente / direct dowload

Sflogliare sulla pagina / browse on website