Opening on Thursday, January 8th, 5-7pm.
Guided tour on Sunday, Februrary 1st, 1pm.
Giant’s Kettle is a cultural trap formed over millennia, from which we are searching for a way out.
Giant’s Kettle is a lament for a world that is increasingly difficult to identify with.
Giant’s Kettle is an art exhibition in which photographs hung on the walls come alive and move.
Giant’s Kettle is a series of austere landscape images of the inner terrain of inevitability.
Giant’s Kettle is repeated falling and the attempt to remain upright, being crushed under gravity, a massive stone block lifted onto one’s head, and cling film wrapped around it.
Giant’s Kettle consists of a series of dreamlike moving-image segments, each a few minutes long, examining the mind’s dualistic dynamics. Fragmented figures repeat the habitual roles of civilization while seeking exit, connection, and relation to others, to nature, to the self. Operating on knowledge without understanding. Emotions concealed.
Giant’s Kettle is a work born from the dialogue between Markku Hakala and Mari Käki and from six years of shared, persistent work. It explores an expressive space between film and photographic art.
Giant’s Kettle is an art film that has received several awards at international film and photography festivals.
Giant’s Kettle is an exhibition of moving images and photographic prints based on this film.
Giant’s Kettle is a cultural trap formed over millennia, from which we are searching for a way out.
The starting point of Giant’s Kettle was a script that wrote itself like a dream, and a fidelity to the images that emerged in this way. Our task was to serve this compelling script and to stay out of its way, allowing what demanded to come into daylight to do so. Although our initial aim was to make a film, the practical working process resembled studio-based fine art photography or digital painting more than film production. We reserved a month of pre-production for each image, during which we explored and built the location or studio, set design, props, and lighting. The actual shooting phase with performers usually lasted one or two days. After this, Markku processed almost all the images through a complex digital workflow, compositing into them photographic and video material shot in various locations: a glacial erratic placed on a ridge, a Soviet-style office building, 3D-modeled birds, a train, shadows, smoke, painted and erased details.
The artist couple Hakala and Käki, based in Ylöjärvi, come from outside both the art world and the film industry. Mari Käki (MA), born 1973, who has studied literary studies and women’s studies, also works as a workplace guidance professional and educator. For Mari, dialogue is life and life is dialogue. Markku Hakala (MA), born 1975, has leapt into being an artist from a background in growth entrepreneurship and an academic career as a researcher in computer science. For him, art and philosophy personally represent the only way to exist in this time.
