Tuesday the FRAME Foundation announced Terike Haapoja and Antti Laitinen as the artists to represent Finland in the 55th Venice Biennale.
Terike Haapoja: Passings (3-channel video installation, 2005 image: Solo exhibition, Gallery Rekord). Photo: Terike Haapoja
Artists Terike Haapoja and Antti Laitinen have been selected to represent Finland at the 55th Venice Biennale next summer. Exhibitions in the Aalto Pavilion and the Nordic Pavilion will be curated by a team consisting of Mika Elo, Marko Karo and Harri Laakso, a press relalese from the FRAME Foundation announced Tuesday.
Terike Haapoja (b.1974) is working in a variety of media including videos, installations and performance projects. Haapoja has exhibited in such places as Kiasma, the Prague Biennale and the UM Festival in Lisboa. She also had a solo exhibition in Oslo at Rekord Gallery in 2007, called Digital Horizons, showing video works projected on the walls and the floor.
– Haapoja’s artistic practice is characterized by the innovative use of new media and new technology. Her work deals with human-non-human relations and the clash of subjective experience of the world with objective knowledge of it, her website states.
Antti Laitinen (b.1975) is known for having constructed a vessel made of bark and sailed it across the Baltic Sea, from the northern part of Finland to Estonia in 2010, and for building an island for and by himself in 2007, resulting in the video work It’s My Island. In 2009 It’s My Island was part of the Earth – Art of a changing world exhibition at Royal Academy of Arts in London.
More information on the Finnish exhibitions at the Venice Biennale will be available at a press conference held in the premises of the FRAME Foundation on Wednesday, 31 October 2012, at 11.00 am.
Antti Laitinen: It’s my island, still picture from video, 2007.
The press conference will be attended by Raija Koli, Director of the FRAME Foundation as of January 2013, Jan Kaila, Chair of the FRAME Board, as well as Terike Haapoja, Antti Laitinen and Marko Karo.
FRAME Foundation is a visual arts foundation supported by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture. The mission of FRAME is to strengthen the position of Finnish visual arts and to promote international cooperation between artists and art institutions.