OPENING
November 14, 2024, 6pm — 9pm
In the presence of:
Hanna Råst, Elsa Salonen & Jaan Toomik
"Wait with great humility and patience for the hour of new clarity:
that alone is to live the artist’s life, in understanding and creation".
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
Humans, always oriented toward the future, inevitably confront the reality of their finitude. This tension between infinite aspiration and the limits of life often creates a sense of impatience. For the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the key lies in fully accepting our ephemeral nature, in "being-there" (Dasein) — either by living authentically, embracing our impermanence, or inauthentically, by fleeing from this reality.
For Hanna Råst, "Being There" is about exploring the role of the archive through history, time, archaeology, memory, and identity. Inspired by the concept of punctum developed by French literary critic and semiologist Roland Barthes, the artist uses photography and video to create "pseudo-archives," temporal illusions that reveal subtle and striking fragments, revisiting the past from a dynamic perspective where time becomes a complex fabric of multiple experiences.
For Elsa Salonen, "Being There" is about resonating in a cosmic, animistic, and alchemical flow in which matter perpetually transforms. By extracting the essence of everything through continuous distillation to produce colored pigments, the artist seeks to prove, with both science and poetry, the existence of a vital energy and to show how everything around us is timelessly interconnected with the self and the universe.
For Kari Vehosalo, "Being There" means perceiving reality and truth differently, shaped by our desires, culture, and unconscious mind. In front of vast landscapes and interior scenes marked by gaping black holes, his almost photographic paintings immerse our gaze in mystery, uncertainty, and fragility.
For Jaan Toomik, "Being There" involves assessing the depth and authenticity of human emotions, both intimate and collective, as they navigate spaces of struggle, memory, and redemption. His multidisciplinary works (painting, performance, sculpture, video, film, and documentary), sometimes as expressive as those of the Viennese Actionists, sometimes meditative and repetitive, draw on both autobiography and strange, alternative experiences of existence.
How can we know if we are fully inhabiting the present or if we are escaping a fleeting moment? What are we seeking in this ever-moving material world? Can we truly grasp the essence of things, or does it remain an elusive dream? What legacy do our wavering memories leave behind? By being present, our existence is neither articulated, nor fixed, nor defined. On the contrary, it breathes, evolves, and liberates itself.
