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.

Consept

Air sustains life on Earth. It is the medium through which sound, light, heat and scent are conducted. It contains the gases necessary for organisms to breathe and thrive, and the pollutants that one particular organism has released that endanger life itself.

Air, then, is not simply what we breathe. While it is often transparent, we can’t see everything it contains. There are invisible elements: the scientific, the environmental, the political. There is power in the air, and the relationship between that power and the sustainability of life is critical. Everything is connected.
How can art approach the issue of air? How can its’ interconnected immateriality be communicated using the methods of art. How can we ‘look’ at air, and what will we see when we turn our attention to it.

The eighth Art Ii Biennial will focus on imagining and sensing air and all its associated elements. The multi-faceted event will present works that explore these issues, offering new thoughts, expressions, and perceptions, and finding ways to give sensory presence to the invisible.

Curators

Minna Rainio & Mark Roberts

Minna Rainio and Mark Roberts are award-winning artists and filmmakers. They create moving image installations and short films that deal with topics such as migration and climate change through their impact on people’s individual experiences and histories. Most of their works use the form of documentary fiction to confront the audience and destabilize perceived boundaries and perceptions of time, space, and society.

Rainio and Roberts’s works have been widely exhibited in Finland and around the world, and their short films have been shown in the official selections of numerous international film festivals. They both studied photography in the UK. Rainio works as an artist and researcher and she received her Doctorate in Arts in 2015. Roberts works as an artist and writer. They live and work in Helsinki, Finland.

Jetta Huttunen

Jetta Huttunen is a cultural producer and curator specialised in art event production and media art. Her focus is in participatory culture and wellbeing-through-art practises. Her interests and competences include resource-wise cultural production and climate conscious art production.

Huttunen completed her PhD in 2020 in which she studied participation within media culture. She is currently working as the Executive Manager of KulttuuriKauppila Art Center in Ii and lives in Oulu.

Artists

See also