Using torches to light their path, paleolithic people traversed caves painted with a vast array of animal and humanoid figures. The interaction between the dancing flame and the structural formations of the walls made the images appear to move as if alive. The art of the era could be viewed as a kind of proto-cinema, where the audience was an active agent in shaping the experience.
Auguries builds on this engagement by examining the past and the possible future traces of contemporary humankind. The complex and paradoxical nature of thinking about the future gives way to re-examining past expressions of creativity. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it–thus all such examinations of the past, like predictions of the future, are necessarily speculative.
Fixating on the dreamed and the doomed, the artists consider the relationships between deep time and the present in a non-linear, queer oriented approach. Drawing inspiration from prehistory as well as the potential forms and traces we will leave behind for future generations to discover, the artists’ research resulted in new multidisciplinary art works. Study of manufactured objects and images that have persisted for tens of thousands of years has led the artists to explore new methods of making.
Auguries takes over all of the three spaces of Kunsthalle Turku and presents artworks by Kristoffer Ala-Ketola, AJ Fusco, Artor Jesus Inkerö, and Valter Tornberg.
The exhibition is supported by The Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike).
Artist bios
Kristoffer Ala-Ketola is a multidisciplinary artist who graduated from Yale School of Art with a Master of Fine Arts in 2019. His works have been previously exhibited in 4th Ward Project Space in Chicago, Shin Gallery in New York, and Kunsthalle Helsinki, and he has also participated in video screenings at the Helsinki International Film Festival and Video Art Festival Turku. Ala-Ketola’s work engages in recurring themes of human emotion, crisis, and dreaming. He uses different media in order to build his installations which usually include video, photography, text, painting and sculpture.
AJ Fusco’s work focuses on the psychological effects of visual indeterminacy, using drawing and painting to examine the active, subjective nature of seeing. Using an interdisciplinary process incorporating digital media, his drawings evoke natural phenomena with images that suggest recognizable subject matter but elude clear identification. This exploration of semantic uncertainty is an attempt to articulate the biological constraints of human knowledge. His works have been exhibited in Helsinki, Finland, and throughout the United
States.
Artor Jesus Inkerö is a Finnish artist whose works have been exhibited in New Museum, NOON Projects in Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, and SALTS gallery in Basel. They have participated in artist residencies, such as the Somerset House in London, Centrale Fies in Italy, and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. In addition to their creative work, Inkerö was invited as an consultant for the committee for the future at the Finnish Parliament and is a board member at AV-Arkki. In their art practice, Artor Jesus Inkerö focuses on queer identity and belonging, as well as with societal questions, through exhibitions, performances and public art works and projects.
Valter Tornberg’s works range from multimedia installations and performances to poetry and writing—unpacking technological, ideological, and political structures behind images and anthropocentric systems of knowledge production, along with the concomitant recursivity of knowledge. By researching alternative ecological figurations and worldings, reaching from pre-historic phenomena to digital technologies, Tornberg’s works explore ambiguities that can suggest more complex imbrications and alliances. Tornberg graduated from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and has previously exhibited works at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Het HEM in Zaandam, and Forum Box in Helsinki. He’s currently attending the Critical Studies MA program at Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam.
