Art Ii Biennial 2012

Along with Art Ii Biennial 2012, Ii Municipality obtained a unique Environmental Art Park which binds together the environmental art in Wanha Hamina and at KulttuuriKauppila Art Centre. The art of that biennial was prepared for the Environmental Art Park, which is located along nelostie, the national road No. 4, on the banks of the picturesque River Ii at the cape Koskiniemi. The Environmental Art Park forms a recreational area for residents and travelers alike. The partners made a preliminarily selection of artists working in their regions, and the main curator of the Art Ii Biennale, Timo Jokela, made the final choice of the artists who were to be invited to the exhibition.

Curators

Timo Jokela

Professor Timo Jokela from the University of Lapland curated this biennial. He also took part in the biennial as an artist. Jokela is the dean at the Faculty of Art and Design and the Professor of Art Education at the University of Lapland. He is also the Visiting Professor of Enviromental Art and Art Education at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. As an environmental artist, Jokela is known

for works which are highly responsive to feelings and moods and which highlight the characteristics of the locale and engage the local community. Jokela has carried out a number of environmental and social art projects to honor the northern indigenous peoples especially in the Paatsjoki area in Pechenga, on the River Virjajoki on Kola Peninsula, and on the Amur River in Khabarovsk close to the Chinese border, all of these in Russia.

Artists

Nikolai Fedorov

Colourful pieces of cloth, a graphic tree with its wind chimes and white stones bring a cheerful breath of Northern Siberia to Ii, from the province of Yakutia. The work, leaning on Yakutian folk tradition and philosophy of life, brings the watcher to the other end of the world, to a place that asks you to calm down with its beauty. When you write wishes on the white stones of the work, they travel through the tree up into the sky from where they return back onto the earth in the form of a rain.

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Serge Olivier Fokoua

’Crowd’ with its kettle heads and wooden bodies welcomes a guest to the environmental art park of Ii, opened in 2012. The work, composed of kettles and pans collected from the local people, and of logs, reminds us of the importance of food as well as of the variety of nature and mankind. Cooking and kettles and pans connected to it are an important part of the everyday life of people living both in Finland and in Cameroon. With the logs in the work, Fokoua wishes to point out how people are in a manner similar to trees different both from outside and inside.

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Timo Jokela

A work of site specific art, composed of a rake, a boat and a small building tells the story of the artist’s own family. Jokela’s grandfather moved to Ii with his daughter in the 1930s, with an axe as his only property. The grandfather who worked as a carpenter and a boat-maker came to Ii to build houses, some of which are still standing. The family’s daughter recalled on her turn in her old days how it was the best time of a summer to be in haymaking in the meadows of Hiastinlahti.

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Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir

The very own wishing well of Ii is found in the shelter of a forest, under a big spruce. The well is surrounded by lava stones brought from Iceland that originate from the eruption of a volcano. The artist tells visitors to throw coins into the well and wish at the same time something good. You’ll never know, if the wish might come true.

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Sanna Koivisto

Sanna Koivisto, a visual artist from Ii, has created a meeting point in the environmental art park, to take a stand on people’s loneliness. The words ‘Notice me’ burned in 14 different languages into a white park bench remind us about the fact how many lonely people there are in the world. Anyone can enjoy the beauty of nature and meet another human being by the chairs placed in the middle of a pine forest.

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Lena Stenberg

A log cabin that is upside down at the river bench is a funny sight. The artist does not only want to make the audience happy with her work, but in addition to this, she also wants to turn self-evident things upside down. Because all the people do not have a roof over their heads, we should learn to appreciate our own homes more than before.

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Ole Wich

The work, dealing with life and death, pays homage to a 34-year-old birch from Ii that was felled for the work. The birch erected into the ground with the top foremost has been stripped off for its funeral. It looks towards the graveyard located on the opposite bank, facing the inevitable death that came entirely unexpectedly in its case. Blue ropes between living birches and the dead birch reflect the sorrow and longing that binds the living and the dead together.

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See also

Art Ii Biennial 2024

Concept - Fire Unbound

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Art Ii Biennial 2022

The theme of the 2022 Art Ii Biennial was “In the Air”. The biennial presented a compilation of 14 artworks, which addressed issues related to air as well as introduced new insights and methods to dealing with the element that surrounds us.

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Art Ii Biennial 2020

The Finnish word maa means earth, but also country, dirt, ground, land soil, and terrain. The word also refers to the world. The concept of the Art Ii Biennial 2020 encompasses all these aspects of the earth and specifically the knowledge they possess. 

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Art Ii Biennial 2018

The concept of the Art Ii Biennial 2018 was built around the concept of water: water as the fundamental element in all forms of life, a cultural interface, a transformable material, a natural storage medium. The projects of the artists presented by the Art Ii Biennial 2018 demonstrated the large creative potential of water as a theme and as a medium.

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Art Ii Biennial 2016

The Art Ii Biennial 2016 studied interlinkages between environmental art and the use of natural materials in the Sámi crafts tradition; the theme was “The Poetics of Material”. The event aimed to create new suggestions for how traditional Sámi livelihoods and Sámi identities could be conceived in our modern global economy and politics.  Artists were chosen for this biennial on the basis of how connectedness to nature was manifest in their work.

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Art Ii Biennial 2014

The theme of the Art Ii Biennial 2014, “Landscapes of Mind and Language”, explored the interaction among language, mind, culture and environment. This biennial challenged the artists, urging them to research into their language and mind with the means of environmental art.

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Art Ii Biennial 2010

The theme for the second Art Ii Bienniale, held in 2010, was Periphery. That theme aroused a lively debate which was further inspired by the conference lecture by the critic Otso Kantokorpi. The participation of the sensational conceptual artist Lars Vilks kindled a great amount of media buzz, particularly because he made his appearance with the Finnish Security Police; another instigator of media buzz was the attempted burning of Vilks’ piece, called Asema (Ii Tower), during the Midsummer festivities.

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Art Ii Biennial 2008

The theme for the first Art Ii Biennial, held in Ii in 2008, was Northern environmental art – structures and impact. The artists represented very different forms of northern environmental art, and during the ten-day workshop, they and their assistants produced pieces that were eventually placed in famous cultural heritage sites in the town of Ii: the old harbor and trading place Wanha Hamina and the KulttuuriKauppila Art Centre. The participation of Sir Alfio Bonanno, a legendary figure in land art and nature installations, made this Art Ii Biennal an exhibition with international significance.

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