Curating the exhibition When time no longer flows, it wells up and pools without a rim in two parts

Application summary

The exhibition When time no longer flows, it wells up and pools without a rim is organised in two parts over the year 2022 in Helsinki and in Tallinn. These two exhibitions explore the ideas I have been engaged with since participating Kone Foundation home residency with particular focus on the potential of slow or vacant time. The exhibitions suggest that the idle moments, which spare us from the demands of the immediate present, can prompt visions of new futures that are connected to transindividual concerns. Now that the current economical order is coming apart – while creating the impression that 'future' as 'promise' has been canceled – the visual alternatives can keep ourselves and those around us afloat as well as oriented towards what is to come. In response to this future-oriented search for hope, the exhibitions give shape and form to the dreams of the new shared prospects through the artworks that they entail. By reminding that ecological sustainability cannot be achieved only through personal efforts, collective ways of living (which are often shown as undesirable in mainstream media through the examples of communist regimes, religious cults and by framing hitchhiking or dumpster-diving as dangerous) are presented in the exhibitions as preferred alternatives to the individualism. The shows also include positive reminders of how much the world has changed during the second half of the past century while assuring that social order will continue to transform towards greater equality also in the future. That way it can be seen as a suggestion to work together and to reduce the velocity of living so that structures that appear unyielding could be overturned.