Victoria Keddie’s exhibition Exercising Consumption opened at Café Puhuri

The exhibition by New York-based artist Victoria Keddie will be on display at Café Puhuri until the end of June 2020. The exhibition draws its inspiration from breathing exercises aimed at tuberculosis patients at the Paimio Sanatorium in the early 20th century.

In the spring of 2020, Café Puhuri will feature twelve photographs of Victoria Keddie’s Exercising Consumption – a body of work that incorporates performance, video, and photography. The exhibition draws its inspiration from a photographic diagram found at the Paimio Sanatorium, designed by Alvar Aalto, in Southwest Finland. The diagram detailed experimental positions for patients with tuberculosis. The patients would, in practice, rotate between each position in the effort to breath.

In her works, implementing the basic set present in the diagram (bed, blocks, spitting cup), Keddie performs each of the holding positions as the patient would exercise them.

“This apparent stillness in position mirrors respiration; time slows down to focus on breath-as-action,” Keddie tells.

“We hold our breath before the lens – to be captured, documented, illustrated, remembered.”

Based in New York City, Victoria Keddie (b.1980) is an artist working in varying media and broadcast. Keddie’s work explores electromagnetic systems, media ecologies, and the machinic body. For over seven years, she has been the Co-Director of E.S.P. TV, a 501(C)3 nomadic TV studio, and episodic cable access serial, that hybridizes technologies to realize synthetic environments and deconstruct the televisual for live performance. Keddie teaches Advanced Televisual Broadcast at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City, and has lectured extensively. She has been an invited resident artist at several artist residencies and performed and exhibited internationally at venues and festivals.

The changing exhibitions in Puhuri present works by the alumni of the Saari Residence, maintained by Kone Foundation. Victoria Keddie worked at the Saari Residence in fall 2018.

Further information:

www.victoriakeddie.com/exercising-consumption