Personal Object
March 12–August 2, 2020
Every now and then, Kunsthalle Kohta hosts an artist in Helsinki for a month or two to make and exhibit new work. Our current exhibition, opened in March and reopened in June after Finland’s Covid-19 lockdown, is the result of such a residency and features Yane Calovski (North Macedonia, 1973).
Educated in the US, Japan and the Netherlands, Calovski has been active in the Macedonian capital Skopje since the mid-2000s and is often seen on the international exhibition circuit. He represented his country at the Venice Biennale in 2015 together with his partner Hristina Ivanoska.
Personal Object is a solo project by Calovski, with new pieces as well as material from his archive. Drawing is a crucial component of his practice: proof of the unbroken connection between thought and image and object and physical environment and lived reality. He has, for instance, done extensive drawing-based projects around his parents’ self-designed house in Skopje and around Japanese “metabolic” architect Kenzō Tange’s master plan for the city after the 1963 earthquake.
Calovski’s exhibition contains selected drawings from the last 20 years displayed, together with poems by his late father, the prominent Macedonian poet and radio journalist Todor Calovski, on wall-mounted plywood panels as part of the work Closet, 2020. There is also a new version of the work after which the whole venture is named. Personal Object (2017–18), a sculptural installation comprising synthetic rubber, metal hooks and cosmetics that belonged to his late mother, Biljana Calovska.
The dominant physical presence is Embroidery (2020). It is a wooden construction painted black, a drawing in space, the prototype for an architectural folly—and a reinterpretation of a small embroidery of abstract geometric shapes made by Biljana Calovska sometime in the early-to-mid 1970s. Bed and Toy (both 2020) are sculptural compositions in foam and wood that evoke her educational practice of doing and making things while lying on the floor.
As its title indicates, Personal Object is an exhibition about the personal and about objecthood. It is about the experimental use of subjectivity as a material. The entire display will be reconfigured in Limerick, Ireland, this autumn as part of the 39th EVA International biennial.
On August 12, Kohta opens its next exhibition, titled Lucid and featuring new paintings and drawings by Nina Roos (Finland, 1956). Roos is one of the leading Nordic artists of her generation. She represented Finland at the Venice Biennale in 1995, had large retrospective exhibitions at Kiasma in Helsinki in 2001 and at Malmö Konsthall in 2003 and was Professor of Painting at the Academy of Visual Art in Helsinki in 2001–2004.
Roos is well-known and appreciated for her experimental approach to the painted image and her uncompromising commitment to painting as a fluid but demanding system of thought. Lucid will embody her current understanding of painting as both perceived experience and mediated articulation. As ever, colour—this time subdued but therefore all the more intense hues of greyish pink and blueish grey – is a main character in her series of images, with titles such as An Object That Lost Its Name (2020).
Charlie Morrow: A Gathering will conclude Kohta’s exhibition programme for 2020 and remind visual arts audiences of the treasures they sometimes overlook in their own city. The title is borrowed from A Gathering of Healers, the publication for an eponymous event that Morrow organised in New York in 1977 and that is about to be re-released by Recital, Los Angeles.
Morrow (US, 1942, lives in Helsinki and Vermont) is a composer, sound artist and sound specialist, poet, graphic artist, events organiser and much more. He has called himself “multi-hatted” (although always wearing his signature bowler hat) and a “frame-maker,” authoring a dazzling multitude of works and events, from intimate breathing chants to city-wide musical extravaganzas.
Morrow’s exhibition at Kohta will be a compressed survey, with new audio-visual work (including sound and site-specific drawing) and selections from his vast archive kept in Barton, Vermont, and spanning more than six decades. In the 1960s he was involved in New York’s music and art scene, collaborating with Charlotte Moorman on her yearly Avant Garde Festival. In the 1970s he and poet Jerome Rothenberg launched The Wilderness Foundation, which among other things published EAR magazine and organised a long series of summer solstice concerts around the world. The exhibition will be accompanied by book launches and re-enacted performances.
Kohta is a privately initiated kunsthalle in Helsinki, inaugurated in November 2017. The programme consists of five exhibitions a year, accompanied by public events. It brings together contemporary artists from Finland and the rest of the world in solo and group exhibitions, showcasing artists from all active generations working in a variety of media and genres.
The newly refurbished website www.kohta.fi documents the programming and also functions as tool for publishing essays, mostly (but not exclusively) about the artists we exhibit. “Appraisals,” a series of monographic essays by Kohta’s director Anders Kreuger, is now being launched with Yane Calovski: Truth and Content.
The Council responsible for Kohta’s programming consists of Kreuger, Finnish artists Magdalena Åberg, Martti Aiha, Thomas Nyqvist, Nina Roos and Hans Rosenström and Polish-English filmmaker and lecturer Richard Misek. Kohta has a staff of two: the director and the gallery manager Mia Dillemuth.
Kohta was launched with support from the EMO Foundation, which funds the arts in Finland, and is currently supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the City of Helsinki, the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland, Konstsamfundet and Stiftelsen Tre Smeder. Kohta is also sponsored by the paint maker Tikkurila and Helsingin Kahvipaahtimo (Helsinki Coffee Roastery).
