TERRITORIO exercises – Joakim Pusenius
Exhibition opening on Friday 11.10. at 18-20, welcome!
In the dark, a child in fear comforts himself by humming quietly to himself. He walks and stops to the beat of his song. Lost, he seeks shelter or peace with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilising, peaceful and stable centre in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips parts as he sings, speeding up or slowing down his pace. The song itself is already a leap: it leaps from chaos to the moment of the beginning of its order and is in danger of breaking up at any moment.
(Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, “Mille Plateaux”, 1980)
The exhibition explores attempts to create spaces of security and permanence in a changing and uncertain world. At its heart are territorial gestures, choruses – ways of acting that themselves construct and delimit space in the midst of chaos. The series of photographs that bears the exhibition’s name consists of a series of children’s rickshaws shot on black-and-white film. These huts, found in the woods near settlements, are like a kind of rehearsal homes. Their distinctive and sometimes primitive architecture raises the question of man’s universal need to build shelter for himself.
The video work Aporia explores the process of maintaining a dwelling and the concern for the home that reaches the point of neurosis. Underlying this concern is the understanding that the security of the home is a construct that could collapse at any moment. The video follows the seemingly endless cycle of reassurance of a person leaving their home. The exhibition draws its tension between the two images. The same mantra can be heard repeating in the minds of both the builders of the hut and the neurotic who is leaving his home: “This is it. That belongs there. This is this. This is good.”
Joakim Pusenius (b.1984) works with moving image, photography and installations. His artistic work is multi-media, but can be seen as beginning and returning to film and its special relationship with time and memory. In his artistic work, Pusenius directs his gaze towards the contemporary condition of human life. The characters found in the loose moments of Pusenius’ works rarely tell their own particular story, but are always constructed as part of a larger whole or situation they are witnessing. Pusenius graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2014 and completed further training at Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains in 2016-2017. Pusenius’ works have been screened at the international festival of experimental cinema Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin for several years. His most recent solo exhibition was at Galleria Huudo 2024 in April.
The exhibition is supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the Finnish Cultural Foundation and AVEK.
Thanks to Vlado Zrnić, Arto Pusenius, Dialab, Telefoto, Av-Saarikko.
Translated with DeepL.com