City to City: Periphery – Jakub Pišek (SK) x Anni Kinnunen (FI)

We invite you to the opening of the exhibition City to City, which is part of the Art & Tech Days festival.

The vernissage of a video art piece, created during an online residency, will be the result of international online collaboration between Finnish artist Anni Kinnunen from the city of Oulu and Košice-based artist Jakub Pišek.

During the more than month-long residency, they will create a work reflecting on the theme of Periphery, which will be presented alongside the piece Discarded Sound on November 21, 2024, at the ALFA Gallery in Kasárne/Kulturpark.

PERIPHERY

The presented artwork is the result of the cooperation of two artists, two personalities who are connected by their creativity and internally mature approach to artistic solution. Anni Kinnunen’s videos are calm and contemplative.

Their principle is hidden in a change of perspective on time, which passes as if in disagreement with reality, with our culture of blinking, with the phenomenon of fast editing, the constant flow of information. Seemingly simple or minimalist means arouse in us at first sight the challenge to examine what we are looking at. After a while, we find that we are not observing the content of the video, but we are observing ourselves. The external impulse turns us inward, we are confronted with a new sensibility and a fleeting calmness hidden in the reserved color and restrained, even enigmatic, shapeliness.

This “intimate” material in the hands of Jakub Píšek opens up to a new interpretative plane. Time which has been linearly flowing until now unfolds in the surface. Concentration on a point in the center of the screen dissolves into endlessly running strips. We see a closed world in its past, present and future. Everything is accessible in one moment and one place.

In this way Jakub approaches not only figuratively but pragmatically Wagner’s fascination with metaphysics, which he capitalized in the libretto for the opera “Parsifal” where space and time are mystically united “Raum und Zeit”. In Jakub’s progressive and very contemporary interpretation, we find time in the dynamic flat surface of a large-scale projection.

Anni Kinnunen
Anni is a visual artist whose most important instrument is photograph, but she also works with video art and installations. Anni is settled in a strong line of Finnish artists that use performing art in pictures, but her photographs are not self-portraits, and they are not related to the mock-documentary self-portrait often seen in contemporary photographic art. During the past two decades, Anni’s works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Japan, China, Russia, Germany, Slovenia, Italy, Iceland, Denmark, Luxembourg, USA and Canada. In Finland, she has participated in events such as the Young Artists exhibition of Kunsthalle Helsinki (2009), the Snowball Effect Northern Finland Biennale (2012, 2014, 2016) and Mänttä Art Festival (2013, 2018). Her works are included in the collections of the Oulu Museum of Art, the Finnish State Art collection.

Jakub Pišek
Jakub is a graduate of Atelier of the New Media in Košice, studied under the supervision of a German artist Anna Tretter. He was on internship at Ecole des Beaux arts in Bordeaux, France and at residence in Dortmund in RUHR European capital of culture 2011. After ping pong workshop he begun to write his own software for interactive installations. In his production, he uses technology both as a medium and as a goal of his interests. Instead of presenting old pieces repetitively, he rather demonstrates creation of a piece on-the-spot.

He lets the genius loci be visible, works with site specifics and flexibly reacts to the emerged situation. He is devoted to video, computer graphics, interactivity and music. Now he works as media artist in various fields, like interactivity, performance, audio and video and real time graphics. His background is interdisciplinary, holding degrees in visual and performing arts, software prototyping and computer sience. He is user of open source hardware and software and working in intentions of DIY. Jakub is the man behind famous performance Hallogenerator, Turbosampler and Barcode djs.

The project was supported by the  Slovak Arts Council . The Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of the project.