Two retrospective exhibitions will open at WAM on 7 February

Camp and public figures

The exhibition includes Nygren’s videos, as well as manuscripts for movies, sketches, portfolios, drawings, and paintings from the early days of her career to this day.

Nygren lives and works in Turku. She has been making videos and films since the late 1970s, first with a ciné film camera and later with a video camera. Her first actual video work, called Rakkaudesta rocktähteen, is from 1982. In her pieces, Nygren reflects on important and serious themes, but they also include plenty of hearty DIY spirit, sharp humour, self-irony and criticism of popular culture.

Nygren is not trying to seek approval through technical quality, and the camp spirit is an essential factor in her production. She often uses public figures or figures from popular culture, and her works have featured Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton, Joan Collins and Renny Harlin, to name a few.

 

30 years of collective thinking

The artist group Hyäryllistä engages in collective thought and plays in their works with forms, materials and images to achieve humorous, quirky takes on reality.

Hyäryllistä have been working together for an impressive 30 years. The group members Jouko Korkeasaari, Sari Koski-Vähälä, Heli Kurunsaari and Harri Lukkari met at the Liminka School of Arts in the early 1990s. For many years, the group members lived and worked in Turku, where they also shared a workroom on Aninkaistenkatu.

During their shared journey, the artists have made it their principle to make by hand and keep the work process slow. Their works merge the joy of thinking and doing together, and in contrast also blend in comments on the ever-accelerating rate of consumption. Through their work, Hyäryllistä addresses the foolishness of excess and consumerism and how we without question accept frivolous consumption as a part of life. The name of the group refers to the Finnish word for useful and parodies the usefulness of making and producing things.

All the members also work as individual artists, and the objective of their shared work is to combine their individual styles seamless to make coherent entities. The group members’ different perspectives and strengths come together organically in their cooperative pieces. Today, Hyäryllistä mostly creates spatial installations where everyday materials and objects are linked together in various ways to become something entirely different – often quite humorous.