Stories From the Sea, Stories From the City

Stories From the Sea, Stories From the City

Stoa Gallery

Helsinki, Finland

29.6-15.8.2020

Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea explores seven international artists’ varied, inventive approaches to storytelling. It does so by prioritizing narration - the manifold ways stories can be told. Encompassing painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation, and film, the works unpick conventional narrative approaches to communicate ideas about myths, memory, and everyday experiences, among other themes, investing both abstract and representational forms with narrative content. Here the individual works break away from a traditional linear format, presenting cyclical and open-ended stories; narration through silence; and mysterious, incomplete narratives constructed through fragments and clues.

For some artists, storytelling requires plots, characters, or settings. As for others, the narrative potential lies in the subject matters and their embedded cultural associations. The artists in this exhibition uncover layers of meaning, turning to individual experiences to convey shared stories, whether real or fictional.

Serine Bandari (b.1988, Tehran, Iran) is an Iranian Armenian artist working between Tehran and Yerevan. Her work for the exhibition was inspired by Persian folklore, placing ordinary elements of everyday life in a landscape of the extraordinary. Traveling through the oddity and deformity of beings in what at times seems like the aftermath of a post-apocalyptic and depraved world, Serine explores to mine an ore infinitely more elusive–the human soul–and, toward that end, interprets physical oddities as merely incidental.

Mina Jafari’s (b.1987, Tehran, Iran) works are strongly inspired by the notion of dreams and how one can recreate a world within them. The reimagined illusive world of her paintings/prints is a peculiar space that humorously summons the viewers to its narrative. Not knowing what has happened before or what will happen after, the viewers are invited to pick up where the artist has left. Mina uses the chalcography technique as it lets her reproduce an image, like having the same dream repeatedly.

Vajid Amini’s (b. 1985, Sanandaj, Iran) works for the exhibition investigate the unsettling notion of memory. They reimagine familiar spaces, altering them into lost integrities that create an image that reinforces the anywhere/nowhere character of memories, blurring the thin line between construction and deconstruction, security and insecurity, private and public, peace and chaos.

Juha Hilpas’s (b.1981, Finland) work, Mythical Broadcast System, is an installation using makeshift broadcast equipment to transmit a video signal containing interpretations of Finnish myths as they are presented in the book: ”Mythical Stories”, by Lauri Simonsuuri, among other sources. This video installation seeks to intertwine the sense of wonder of folklore with the nostalgia of outdated video equipment of the more recent past. TV-signal travels in high frequencies, at the speed of light, and in theory, once they are transmitted, they will continue going through space for eternity. This way, the myths are not only presented in installation but also preserved in signal through space for all knowable eternity.

His work ‘Chase / Jahti’ meditates on its sounds and the sea horizon to escape the persistent claustrophobia and anxiety in everyday life. Birds, especially marine birds, have been venerated in Finnish mythologies due to their ability to peer between or outside the worlds of the living and the dead. It is his feeling that for the phoenix to be reborn, it needs to be reconstructed and will, as such always reflect the imperfections of its era.

Shahi Derky (b. 1997, Damascus, Syria), Aishe Vejdani (b. 1986, Gonbad Kavus, Iran) and Uzair Amjad’s (b.1989, Lahore, Pakistan) collective film ‘Because They Were Three, They Were Four’ utilize the premise of a video chat between three close friends to examine the multiple realities of a shared experience. The conversation between the three friends is anchored around one of their shared experiences. Each friend retells what they saw that night in the flickering light. A dog? A leash? Or a man walking backward up the street? This retelling of the story manifests through a series of internal and external conversations and reveals more about the times that the characters have lived or are currently living along with their passions and desires. Through storytelling which stems from a common point of departure, the work explores the plurality of truths, the many secrets of time enclosed in ‘the mundane’.