Art center Ahjo, Hiili -space: Anna Rantanen ja Niina Hanhinen

KAHVIKUPILLISIA, CUPS OF COFFEE
ANNA RANTANEN AND NIINA HANHINEN
27.3.–14.4. 2024, HIILI SPACE

Welcome to the opening at 18:00!

"Can a picture be a story and the text work like a picture?"

Anna Rantanen and Niina Hanhinen's exhibition combines fictional texts, textiles and images into an installation and artist books. The exhibition visitor encounters poetic prose and the images that were its starting point. The works combine the slow movement of writing by hand, the excess and contradiction of a moment related to a photograph, and other transformations first into a picture, then into words, and further into a picture in the reader's mind.

The stories are written in 5-15 minutes, the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. Rantanen and Hanhinen play with the artisanal nature and ephemerality of literary expression. The writing of the text goes on and on and on and on, when the photo that is the starting point of the text has been captured in the blink of an eye.

The exhibition reflects on what movement, temporality and materiality mean and how they are realized in handwritten texts and different images produced in practice: Can the book form be realized when hung on a clothesline? What is the way and nature of being in literature and visual arts? Is a handwritten text finished literature? When will the text be ready? Does the viewer have time to explore the feelings evoked by the text and image over a cup of coffee?

The exhibition is the artists' first.

@tuulielain & @niina_hanhinen_art_research