Charles Sandison

HAMEENLINNA ART MUSEUM
Viipurintie 2
September 30–February 5

Charles Sandison, Tavastehus kronomagasines, 2011, computers, projectors, dimensions variable. Installation view.

Charles Sandison’s latest exhibition contains only one work, but it is a big one: Tavastehus kronomagasines, 2011, fills both floors of the museum, yet the viewer experiences it as a single piece, not a thing in two parts. The Scottish-born, Finland-based artist is known for large, continually changing text collages governed by computer programs and projected onto the walls, floors, and even ceilings of museums and galleries. The individual words in his previous pieces often relate to human behavior; together they form images or attempts at full sentences. At the core of these artificial intelligence–operated works is the idea of language as a living, self-perpetuating organism.

The starting point for Tavastehus kronomagasines is the Hämeenlinna Art Museum’s history as a granary, and Sandison has now exchanged his floating words for showers of fast-moving pixels that resemble grain or seeds. These animations are mixed with recurring, looped information pertaining to grain, from hieroglyphs to real-time data on rye, wheat, and barley futures. The organisms of language have now been overshadowed by the organisms of economics, and the result is both joyful and ceremonious.

While it is fun to learn from a wall text that the computing power driving the whole installation is equivalent to that which governs a small town’s traffic-light system, the work does not celebrate technology. Rather, it is an impressive, complex metaphor for life and evolution, inspiring its viewers to contemplate how atoms create worlds as seeds give rise to life.

— Timo Valjakka

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

GALERIE GABRIEL ROLT
Elandsgracht 34
January 13–February 18

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Plate 3, A sunbathing tourist comes to the aid of one of 46 would-be immigrants on La Tejita Beach on the Spanish Canary Island of Tenerife, Thursday Aug. 3, 2006, after the boat they were in ran a ground. (photo Arturo Rodríguez) www.fohguild.org/forums/screenshots/10545-funny-strange-randompics-2372.html, 2011, silk screen on paper, 11 3/8 x 9 1/2".

What purposes can monuments now serve, in a culture so full of messages, meanings, and temptations? That question underlies the exhibition “Portable Monuments” at Galerie Gabriel Rolt, by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, two British photographers who have always been fascinated with what goes unseen in a photograph, an image. In the series “Poor Monuments” (all works cited 2011), the specific object of their fascination is Bertolt Brecht’s book The War Primer (1955), which combines photographs clipped from newspapers (Hitler orating, Dresden after the bombing) with four-line poems. Broomberg and Chanarin have placed a translucent red rectangle over each page; supplementary materials indicate what contemporary image (accessible on the Internet and invariably related to the present-day “war on terror”) should be imagined there.

It is this delayed visual gratification, this prolongation of the desire to consume images, that gives “Poor Monuments” its special value. If you look up the contemporary images on the Internet after returning home, you are confronted with bizarre scenes ranging from Donald Rumsfeld on a unicycle to five dark fingers lying jauntily side by side in the sand—blown off in a bombing.

Delayed visual gratification again plays a role in the artists’ second and most recent series of work, also titled “Portable Monuments.” The photographs show blocks of various colors, which—through grouping, arrangement, and coding—represent news stories. The connection between image and meaning is even more tenuous here, but Broomberg and Chanarin’s creative choices (with strong allusions to modernism) do pull you out of the everyday flow of visual consumption. As far-fetched as its connections may seen, the exhibition makes it abundantly clear that the assignment of meaning, whether to images, photographs, or monuments, is a never-ending process.

Translated from Dutch by David McKay.

— Hans den Hartog Jager

“Sound Spill”

WEST
Groenewegje 136
January 7–February 11

View of “Sound Spill,” 2012.

In the work of British artist Haroon Mirza, sounds are at least as important as images. For the past few years Mirza has been making installations out of a diverse array of objects (such as bouncing nuggets of gold and wobbly record players) and instruments (often electronic), using them to create tones and notes that give every part of the work new meaning, both visual and auditory. The exhibition “Sound Spill,” cocurated by Mirza, veers in a surprising new direction. Here, Mirza and the other two artist-curators, Thom O’Nions and Richard Sides, compose with the work of multiple other artists, and the pieces they have included were obviously selected more for their sonic appeal than for their visual qualities.

There are two sets of work in the gallery. The first brings together two videos by Guy Sherwin and Nina Canell and two installation pieces by Sides and Torsten Lauschmann. It is immediately clear what Mirza and his cocurators have in mind; the images seem disconnected but are linked by their sound tracks, which merge to form a driving, pulsing composition. This effect is even more striking in the second part, in which Gary Hill’s Around and About, 1980, is combined with Sherwin’s Railings, 1977, and Alex Heim’s Untitled (Dog), 2006. They form a weirdly perfect ensemble: With Sherwin as the rhythm section, Heim on organ, and Hill providing the voice, the result is a riveting composition, the perfect accompaniment to the unsettling imagery in the videos. Taken as a whole, the exhibition is above all a first-class Haroon Mirza creation; he uses the videos of his fellow artists to produce an original work that far exceeds the sum of its parts.

Translated from Dutch by David McKay.

— Hans den Hartog Jager

Goldin+Senneby

CRYSTAL CONTEMPORARY ART
Hudiksvallsgatan 4B
January 12–February 11

Goldin+Senneby, Money Will Be like Dross, 2012. Performance view.

The sole object exhibited in Goldin+Senneby’s current show is an eighteenth-century furnace once owned by the alchemist August Nordenskiöld, designed to make gold. But it only serves as garnish for the more compelling works related to the exhibition. On the night of the opening, buses departed from the gallery for Drottningholm Theatre—a majestic playhouse. It was an evening of prestidigitation that announced the duo’s new investment fund, reportedly designed by an anonymous programmer and systems architect: the Nordenskiöld Model Trading Fund.

En route in my bus, an actor playing Senneby introduced the occasion. He read aloud a letter by a playwright named Pamela Carter, which outlined a forthcoming play. This was apparently an open rehearsal, and the goal of the ride was to get passengers up to speed on Nordenskiöld’s alchemy, particularly his experiments on the grounds of Drottningholm. Remarkably, Nordenskiöld never sought alchemy’s riches but rather secretively aimed at making such immense quantities of gold as to expunge its worth—releasing man from monetary tyranny. Once seated in the theater, a magician performed acts evoking issues of duplication. Repeatedly stating, “You need gold to make gold,” she did one stunt that had audience members’ wedding bands disappear and reappear; another trick replicated bottles.

The magic and Nordenskiöld were key elements, of course, in the work. The bus ride was mere necessity and the guided tour was simple, pedagogical filler. And indeed, as was made clear on the bus, this is one part of an extensive project with more to come. But the work on this occasion, which was essentially the debut of their intricately structured fund, made Goldin+Senneby appear as tricksters pulling the strings, as it were, backstage—puppet masters with a fund as real as their fictitious selves that lectured on the busses. However, while the market is extremely volatile and professional money managers seem perplexed about what’s currently happening, Goldin+Senneby’s experiments with finance by way of Nordenskiöld’s utopian ideals might, after all, be exactly what’s needed, even though their fund could very well be double or nothing.

— Theodor Ringborg