OV Exhibition
Anni Puolakka: Heart Milk
Heart Milk, Anni PuolakkaCurators: Barbara Gregov, Lovro Japundžić and Lea Vene
Heart Milk pt.1performance + screening
September 25, 2023 at 9:00 PM
Youth Centre Ribnjak
Concept and Performance by New Fam (Teo Ala-Ruona & Anni Puolakka)
Soundscape: Miša Skalskis
Dramaturgical support: Martta Jylhä
Costume design: Sini Saavala
Heart Milk pt.1 exhibition
September 29, 2023 at 8:00 PM
Miroslav Kraljević Gallery (GMK)
The exhibition is open until September 30th,
during gallery hours.
Free admission, no registration required.
This year’s program is dedicated to examining expanded cinema, or exploring the exhibition potential of moving images in the gallery context. The invited artists start from their existing audiovisual works and expand them into gallery spaces through interaction with other media such as text, performance, and installation. The authors consciously play with lo-fi aesthetics and autofiction, becoming characters in their comically intricate and unconventional narratives. Mundane life situations and everyday experiences take on strange dimensions or acquire supernatural and fantastic characteristics.
At the Youth Center Ribnjak (September 25), we will present a film screening by Finnish artist Anni Puolakka, followed by a performance by the duo New Fam (Teo Ala-Ruona and Anni Puolakka). In the Miroslav Kraljević Gallery (September 26), we will present an exhibition of recent video works by Anni Puolakka and the performance/installation by Tarren Johnson and Joel Cocks.
The works of Finnish artist Anni Puolakka blur the lines between autobiography and fiction, and are grounded in their observations, experiences, and fantasies. They explore the relationship between humans, other living organisms, and the environment. Puolakka’s videos often feature anthropomorphized mammals, parasites, or other predatory organisms that they embody or give voice to. By subverting the roles typical of a species or fetishizing behaviors shared among different species, the artist aims to open new perspectives that have the potential to destabilize existing hierarchies among various living organisms.
The works by Anni Puolakka, created between 2017 and 2023, will be presented in two parts.
Heart Milk pt. 1 includes the screening of the video “Rumina” by Anni Puolakka and the performance “Babymmalian” performed by the collective New Fam. The New Fam collective, consisting of performing artists Teo Ala-Ruona and Anni Puolakka, presents “Babymmalian” as a feeding session in which two performers connect through role-playing, suckling, and lactation. The screening of the video “Rumina” will serve as an introduction to the performance. In “Rumina” the artist contextualizes their personal interest in breastfeeding, explores the political dimension of milk, and seeks to destigmatize the erotic and transgressive connotations commonly associated with the act of suckling.
Heart Milk pt. 2 comprises an installation based on three video works: “Milk Park,” “From the Heart,” and “Diamond Belly.” Starting from breastfeeding and the collective discomfort it typically provokes when taking place in a public space (“Milk Park”), in videos “From the Heart” and “Diamond Belly,” the artist expands their exploration of the relationship between extraction and corporeality. In ‘From the Heart,’ the artist offers the audience the perspective of an enthusiastic heart parasite, while in ‘Diamond Belly,’ they surrender their body to the bloodthirsty mosquitoes.
Anni Puolakka is a Helsinki-based artist. Their works play with the boundaries and potential of humans as they seek meaningful involvement with other beings and materials. Puolakka experiments with theatrical and cinematic traditions as well as contemporary methods through performance, videos, installations, drawings and texts in which documentary materials are incorporated into fictional worlds. Their works have recently been shown at ARS22 exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki), Eye Film Museum (Amsterdam), Baltic Triennial 14 (Vilnius) and BOZAR (Brussels). They received the Finnish State Art Prize in 2022.
Teo Ala-Ruona is a Helsinki-based performance artist, whose work focuses on speculative somatic fiction in forms of performances and texts. He explores topics of sex, queer ecology, toxicity and gender, and looks for ways to re-define language and narratives about pleasure and intimacy on a toxic Earth. By using his own body as a site for various speculative stories to take place, he experiments with how, through fiction, he can transform himself, as well as the perspectives from which others look at his body. Ala-Ruona’s work has recently been shown at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki), ICA (London), VEGA|ARTS (Copenhagen) and Baltic Circle -festival (Helsinki).
New Fam is a performance art collective by Teo Ala-Ruona and Anni Puolakka, which transforms its shape from one artwork to another. New Fam encompasses hybridity, connections between humans and animals, metamorphoses, the opening of bodily orifices, and the flow of fluids. At the core of New Fam is the duo collaboration of Ala-Ruona and Puolakka, but they consider New Fam as a collective that incorporates different contributors depending on each performance.
Design: Alma Šavar
Technical support: Marin Kovačević
Photography: Ive Trojanović
The program is supported by: The Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, City Office for Culture and Civil Society.