Axel Straschnoy
360° 3D Film
Commissioned by Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art
For ARS17+ Online Art arsplus.fi
Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art
Mannerheiminaukio 2
00100 Helsinki
kiasma.fi
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)?”
Etsivä will be available for preview between 24 and 27 May at arteBA, Buenos Aires at Del Infinito (Booth C4). It will premiere on May 26 at 14:00 at the Art & Virtual Reality seminar in Kiasma, Helsinki, after which it will be available to be downloaded from its website arsplus.fi or to be watched at the Museum’s library. Between 30 May and 2 June, it will be presented at Inter Arts Center, Malmö . In October, it will be part of Immersive Worlds, Straschnoy’s first solo exhibition in Italy, at ECCENTRIC Art & Research, Milan.
Axel Straschnoy (born 1978) is a visual artist from Buenos Aires, based in Helsinki. His long-term and research focused projects include Kilpisjärvellä (2011-12), a planetarium film on exploration in northern Lapland under the Northern Lights, La Figure de la Terre (2014), a short film based on the book The Figure of the Earth by 18th century French mathematician and explorer Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, the lecture-performance series Notes on the Double Agent (ongoing), and Le rappel àl’ordre (2016), a film on the packing and shipping of artworks. For Neomylodon Listai Ameghino (2015), he has followed the Neomylodon’s trail back to its cave in Last Hope Sound, Southern Chilean Patagonia, and is in the midst of a multi-part, traveling exhibition to bring the Neomylodon’s remains back together one hundred and twenty years since its discovery. Straschnoy has participated in Le Pavillon residency at Palais de Tokyo (2008-09) and trained in Art History at University of Buenos Aires.
Etsivä is narrated by Pekka Strang and its soundtrack was designed by Karri Niinivaara. The camera operator was Iddo Soskolne and the graphic design was by Geraldine de San Bruno. A mobile application was built by Quadion Technologies to make the film available worldwide.
Etsivä is produced by Kolme Perunaa with support from the Finnish Cultural Foundation, Oskar Öflunds Stiftelse, AVEK, Quadion Technologies and the Arts Promotion Center, Finland. It has been commissioned by Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki and it is in the collection of Kiasma / Finnish National Gallery.
For more information on Axel Straschnoy please click here.