Autumn 2021
The contemporary art commissioning agency IHME Helsinki will be staging two commissions this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. IHME supports art, science, and climate-change mitigation. Our main collaborators are contemporary artists who work in dialogue with scientists, researchers and other experts in various knowledge systems to reflect on the focal questions of the artist’s research. IHME actively explores and distributes information about ways that art organizations can transition to ecological sustainability.
Jana Winderen: Listening Through the Dead Zones
August 6–24, 2021
Listening Through the Dead Zones is a site-specific sound installation by the Norwegian artist Jana Winderen, in collaboration with Tony Myatt.
On the shore of the Baltic Sea, at the Rowing Stadium in Helsinki, the audience will be able to listen to different species of mammals, including humans, and to various species of fish and crustacea inhabiting the ocean. Winderen has been investigating how human activity is influencing the dead zones in the Baltic Sea and similar environments close to shores and in lakes.
Winderen is an artist who is exploring the way human beings interact with and live in their environment with other creatures and plants, and in particular our shared sound environments underwater.
Instead of organizing a seminar in Helsinki, Winderen, together with IHME’s Executive Director, Curator Paula Toppila, has conducted a series of interviews. Local people, scientists and other experts from different fields share their thoughts, current research results, news and ways that any one of us can mitigate bad living conditions, underwater sound pollution, eutrophication and biodiversity loss in the Baltic Sea as part of the World’s Ocean.
Katie Paterson: To Burn, Forest, Fire
September 1–30, 2021
To Burn, Forest, Fire will consist of the scent of the first-ever forest on Earth and the scent of the last forest of the age of climate crisis, made into incense and then burned at a variety of sites around the city of Helsinki in September 2021.
Collaborating with scientists and researchers across the world, Katie Paterson’s projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. Her artworks stage intimate, poetic and philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment.
Art, Science, Ecology lectures
The Art, Science, Ecology online course held from January to March, 2021 aimed to increase awareness of the effects of the crisis of sustainability in art, science and society and to produce and analyse the knowledge necessary for making the changes in ideas and actions required to meet this crisis. The course was created on the initiative of IHME Helsinki in collaboration with the University of Helsinki’s Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS) and the University of the Arts’ Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts.
Lecture documentation includes talks by artist, researcher Antti Majava, artist Jana Winderen, artist, researcher Susan Schuppli, artist Samir Bhowmik, IHME’s Executive Director, Curator Paula Toppila, and a conversation between artist Katie Paterson, Emeritus Professor Jan Zalasiewicz and Docent in Palaeoclimatology J. Sakari Salonen.
IHME Helsinki podcast: Art, Science, Ecology
The contents of the Art, Science, Ecology course are being extended with a series of podcasts hosted by IHME’s Advisory Board in spring 2021. They discuss new approaches in art and in the lives of artists and art institutions responding to the environmental crisis.
In the podcasts you can hear discussions between: Executive Director, Curator Paula Toppila & Artistic Director José Roca; Professor, Founding Director Ute Meta Bauer & artist, researcher Nabil Ahmed; Dean Hanna Johansson & Head of Research Tracey Warr; Professor Jussi Parikka & artist, researcher Susan Schuppli; Jussi Parikka & artist, researcher Samir Bhowmik; and artist, researcher Antti Majava & researcher Emma Hakala & Professor Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen.
The podcast is being produced in collaboration with Helsinki Open Waves.
IHME Helsinki’s work is possible by support from its founding body Pro Arte Foundation Finland with Kone Foundation and Saastamoinen Foundation in 2020-22.
