{"id":1736,"date":"2023-10-21T08:26:31","date_gmt":"2023-10-21T08:26:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kaijahinkula.com\/?p=1736"},"modified":"2023-10-29T06:04:02","modified_gmt":"2023-10-29T06:04:02","slug":"under-conditions-kccc-lithuania","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kaijahinkula.com\/?p=1736","title":{"rendered":"UNDER CONDITIONS \/ KCCC, Lithuania"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>21.10-12.11.2023<br>KCCC, Klaipeda, Lithuania<br>Under Conditions \/ Henna Aho &amp; Kaija Hinkula<br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.kkkc.lt\/en\/exhibitions\/kaija-hinkula-and-henna-aho-duo-exhibition-under-conditions\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><br>https:\/\/www.kkkc.lt\/en\/exhibitions\/kaija-hinkula-and-henna-aho-duo-exhibition-under-conditions\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Under Conditions is a duo exhibition by contemporary artists artists Henna Aho &amp; Kaija<br>Hinkula. Aho and Hinkula examine painting, its new forms and possibilities in the 2020s &#8211; the<br>boundaries, spatiality, materiality, the relationship to one\u2019s own history and to the<br>surrounding reality. The works that freely stretch the traditional form of a painting comment<br>on the surrounding world, creating a space, where craftsmanship and every day life and utopia <\/em><br><em>combine into a process-like whole in the context of extended painting<\/em><br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>On the almost-apparent paintings of<\/strong> <strong>Henna Aho and Kaija Hinkula<\/strong><br><br>Painting as a medium carries a heavy history with itself. As the most studied but also the most<br>sold \u2013 and probably most produced \u2013 art form, a burden, according to many artists and art<br>historians, has cast itself on the medium. How can one say anything about painting, if so<br>much has already been made and stated? It is safe to say that painting has reached a kind of<br>oxymoron: it\u2019s role in museums and text-book examples is solid, but in the infrastructures of<br>contemporary art it is not always taken as given \u2013 it is not too visible. The paradox lies in this<br>notion of visibility since a change in the reception of painting has become apparent, having<br>time to spread its roots. It is not, anymore, interesting to recognize something as a painting;<br>the focus has rather shifted to the medium as an area of artistic operation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Above stated is the main historical and methodological frame in which Henna Aho\u2019s and<br>Kaija Hinkula\u2019s new duo exhibition Under the Conditions at KCCC settles. It also the only<br>settling that takes place in the exhibition, which is constantly in movement. Comprised of new<br>works from both painters, the movement could be described as a kind of double-<br>choreography: that of the artists with the space, and of the visitor in the space. This is not to<br>emphasize a sense theatricality, but to point to the stage-like essence in the way the exhibition<br>is constructed. There is an active relation to this world in the exhibition, but it operates like a<br>game with its own set of rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What could be the rules, then? The space is the first dimension \u2013 concretely and conceptually<br>\u2013 to consider. Tactful and precise attitude towards an exhibition space has been important for<br>both Aho and Hinkula in their practices and previous exhibitions, but in Under the Conditions<br>a notion of site-specificity is taken further. The space, as the artists have stated, is the third<br>agency participating in making the exhibition, and spatial intervention is the main starting<br>point for Aho and Hinkula. It is still not meaningful to place the works in this exhibition to a<br>certain category of site-specific art, since different categories of site-specificity \u2013<br>phenomenological, discursive, or institutional, to name a few \u2013 are constantly getting mixed<br>and blurred. I would rather speak of performative site- and situation-specificity, where<br>performativity points to a number of directions: conceptualizing the exhibition, building it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>with in part materials found in the location, or visitors engaging with the works. Could even<br>this text be seen as an extension for the question of what site-specific painting is?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The artists engage with the space through the artworks in a multitude of ways. After thinking<br>about the space, the urgent question, arising from the title of the exhibition, is that of what are<br>the conditions under which the artists operate. Aho and Hinkula have both experimented at<br>the borders of painting (un)systematically \u2013 one should not argue that they stretch the borders,<br>since the borders know no limits. For example, ready-made objects, which are a seminal part<br>of the artists working habitudes, are re-contextualized in the works. This happens by<br>relocating the ready-made objects to the area of painting, but without them losing their<br>relation to everyday realm. The usage of ready-made objects in the paintings is taken so far<br>that it is not clear where the work starts and where it ends. Is the monitor presenting a video<br>work physically essential part of the work? Or the heater, around which a site-specific<br>painting is built? In the exhibition even painted colors have a ready-made -character to them,<br>as they are chosen by color code rather than by mixing or experimenting. The burdensome<br>history of painting is thus faded, only to emphasize the fact that it is first and foremost<br>painting that is being considered here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Still, there is nothing mystical in Under the Conditions. The references to this world are so<br>direct that it is actually difficult to name them as just references. The works in the exhibition<br>approach painting as a medium in painterly conditions. The rules applied are, thus, strict and<br>loose at the same time: working-in and thinking-with painting, moving as far and as close as<br>possible, and preferably at the same time.<br><br><em>Text by Eero Karjalainen (FI)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>21.10-12.11.2023KCCC, Klaipeda, LithuaniaUnder Conditions \/ Henna Aho &amp; Kaija Hinkulahttps:\/\/www.kkkc.lt\/en\/exhibitions\/kaija-hinkula-and-henna-aho-duo-exhibition-under-conditions\/ Under Conditions is a duo exhibition by contemporary artists artists Henna Aho &amp; KaijaHinkula. Aho and Hinkula examine painting, its&hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/kaijahinkula.com\/?p=1736\"><span class=\"fa fa-mail-forward read-more-icon\"><\/span><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1737,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-group-exhibitions","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/kaijahinkula.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/some2-scaled.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kaijahinkula.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kaijahinkula.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kaijahinkula.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaijahinkula.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaijahinkula.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1736"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kaijahinkula.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1740,"href":"https:\/\/kaijahinkula.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736\/revisions\/1740"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaijahinkula.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kaijahinkula.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaijahinkula.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaijahinkula.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}