The opening of the exhibition Bruise by Artist cooperative Toolbox takes place at HAA Gallery on Wednesday, July 10, 2024 at 5 pm! The exhibition is on display from 11 July to 4 August, 2024. You are warmly welcome!
Henrik Jakob: Serie A.I. Terrorists and Football Players, 11, 2024. Modeling clay.
Vulnerability
The title of the group exhibition, ‘Bruise’, fit into the larger discourse of vulnerability, which today is perhaps of greater significance than ever before in the modern Western world, given the wars in Ukraine and Israel and the experiences of the coronavirus pandemic.
Finding oneself vulnerable, the awareness of the possibility of suffering, is always a topos characterised by great ambivalence, in some ways it is even paradoxical.
On the one hand, there is the phenomenon of the strange disproportionality of actual personal safety: the relation between how many people in a society actually become victims of violent assaults on the one hand and the personal sense of safety on the other, which is widespread in the Western world, here, with regard to the participating artists in Northern and Central Europe, Finland and Berlin in particular: the safer people are, the greater the perceived insecurity – vulnerability – seems to become.
Furthermore, vulnerability is a topos in art, being an artist is associated with a special vulnerability, namely as a special openness that also entails the willingness to be hurt. Openness, not least towards one’s own feelings, allowing and recognising pain is supposed to be a prerequisite for creating art.
In recent decades, society has more and more become aware of real wounds, whether physical or psychological, traumatisation through psychological and sexual abuse have become an issue, and have been picked up as a topic in art. Here, too, an ambiguity can be observed: physical and psychological, personal and group-specific, social traumas are not only depicted in art, but artistic paths can also contribute to their healing, art can convey hope and optimism.
In the special situation today, as noted above, after the corona pandemic, uncertainty has increased, the belief in the omnipotence of medicine, that wounds, diseases, can be healed, has faltered. Finland in particular has experienced an acute threat from the Ukraine war in Northern Europe, and the peace between Russia and Finland has become a precarious one.
Text: Anna E. Wilkens