The fall season of AV-arkki and Cinema Orion’s “Art for Art’s Sake” screening, event and discussion series kicks off on October 8, 2024 with the theme “Touch me”.

The first event titled “Bodily Present” will examine touch, bodily presence and physicality. The event opens with Natalia Koziel’s live cinema performance Warm Data – also seen at Midnight Sun Film Festival last summer – where the artist uses film projectors and an overhead projector to sketch the “warm data” pulsating in the city. The work of the OJOBOCA artist couple The Skin Is Good (2018) and Barbara Hammer’s lesbian film classic Dyketactics (1974) continue the themes of touching and skin-to-skin contact. Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance (1988), on the other hand, looks at bodily longing and the impossibility of touch. In Minna Suoniemi’s work Hit (2006), the artist longs for a different kind of touch; she asks to be hit in the face. The last work will be presented Keep On Trying (2012) by visual and performance artist Diana Soria Hernandez.

Art for art’s Sake brings together artists moving image, media art and experimental film from Finland and around the world, novelties and classics. The drama series has been supported by the Kone Foundation, the Ministry of Education and Culture and the City of Helsinki. The series is curated by a working group consisting of Diego Ginartes, Sepideh Rahaa, Azar Saiyar and Avreno Heikka. The next Art for Art’s sake shows will be shown on November 5, 2024 and December 10, 2024. Admission to the screenings is free!

Book your free ticket from Cinema Orion’s web store.

Art for Art’s Sake: Touch Me
Bodily Present | Oct 8, 2024

Natalia Koziel: Warm Data (live cinema performance)
Step into the bustling streets of Toronto through the small-scale project designed as both, live expanded cinema and digital film, where the visual narrative unfolds in layers of urban information captured entirely on 16mm black and white film to tell the story about city symphony.

Entitled ”Warm Data,” it shows deep into the fabric of the metropolis, where every frame pulses with the city dynamics and offers another dimension of understanding to what is typically learned only through quantitative data, (cold data).

Here, two 16mm film projectors are joined by an old, school-type overhead projector. I use this machine like a puppeteer tool, where I rhythmically animate folded silhouettes of paper that echo the  shapes of the city. Adding a kaleidoscope of filters, I fill in the simple black-and-white frames of the film with colors, textures and mesmerizing patterns. With live projections and hands-on manipulations, I carefully orchestrate the pace and flow of the story.

OJOBOCA: The Skin Is Good (2018)
The skin fiend is a stranger. He sent us strange messages. In the last message the skin fiend said: “Try to be skin fiends for a moment. How, you ask? Well, to be a skin fiend one has to summon the skin demon. To summon the skin demon, one has to say the skin prayer.” We made this film for you, skin fiend. What do you think?

Barbara Hammer: Dyketactics (1974)
“Hammer’s films of the ’70’s are the first made by an openly lesbian American filmmaker to explore lesbian identity, desire and sexuality through avant-garde strategies. Merging the physicality of the female body with that of the film medium, Hammer’s films remain memorable for their pioneering articulation of a lesbian aesthetic.”
-Jenni Sorkin, WACK! Art & The Feminist Revolution

Mona Hatoum: Measures of Distance (1988)
Measures of Distance (1988), a 15-minute video work, tacitly foreshadows Hatoum’s evolution from the more subjective perspective of performance-based work to the sculptures and installations she has produced in the intervening decade. The video’s key footage uses a visual screen of Arabic script — taken from a series of letters between the artist and her mother — that is superimposed over the filmed image of her mother taking a shower. The screen both frames and obscures her mother’s body. In both the literal sense that it was made during a visit home, and in a broader sense as well, Measures of Distance is one of the few examples of Hatoum’s work to employ direct reference to the artist’s exiled condition. Hatoum, a Palestinian born in Beirut in 1952, was stranded in Europe at the outset of civil war in 1975 (the municipal airport in Beirut was closed for nine months), and decided to study art in London, where she has subsequently lived most of her adult life. In the video’s soundtrack, as well as in the graphic image of text layered over flesh, Hatoum explores how degrees of proximity and separation can be conveyed by employing both concrete examples (her mother taking a shower), and more formal abstractions (text, paper, voices, a trip to Beirut).

Minna Suoniemi: Hit (2006)
In ‘Hit’, the artist asked someone to hit her in the face. The slow motion image reveals every hint of a facial expression. The slowed-down sound resembles the sound of a tennis match.

Diana Soria Hernandez: Keep On Trying (2012)
Keep on Trying is a video work made a year after moving to Finland. The efforts and success required for such an endeavor become clouded by the new challenges. Through printmaking techniques, the repetition and erasure of Keep on Trying depicts what seems the never ending path of efforts. The weight of text on the skin is repealed by gestures only to start again.