Moderate Manipulations

The three video works that comprised Henna-Riikka Halonen’s installation at Artspace for the 19th B iennale of Sydney (2014) form what the Finnish artist has called a ‘future trilogy’. Each film an artwork in its own right, they come together here to forge a collective imagining of fictional scenarios of the future. The films are linked in their references to futurist theatre, literature and design, and in their use of the built environment as a backdrop for Halonen’s restaging of these ideas in a contemporary light.

Strange Place for Snow (2010) opens with a woman, apparently from another time, delivering, on a spot-lit stage, a cryptic monologue recounting her experience of time travel. The dialogue, borrowed from H. G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine (1895), is intentionally non-linear, leaving the narrative open to interpretation by the viewer. Set in the historical border town of Berwick-upon-Tweed in northeast England, the film traces the woman’s steps through the changing landscape of the area; a portrait of both the protagonist and the architectural environment. The spaces that she wanders through appear redundant and disused: a sterile office space, an abandoned supermarket, a desolate housing estate. A sense of anxiety and anticipation pervades, as the film shifts in time and blurs scenes of reality with fiction.

In The Bath House (2009), Halonen engages the Junior Edinburgh Diving Club to perform a 12-minute interpretation of a Russian constructivist play by futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, originally directed by Vesevolod Meyerhold in 1930. The film is set in the modernist surroundings of the Royal Commonwealth Pool in Edinburgh; the tiled splendour of the building providing a contrasting backdrop to the youth and levity of the performers, and an atmosphere reminiscent of the set of the 1930s satire.

The final part of Halonen’s trilogy, Moderate Manipulations (2012), makes use of Finnish architect Matti Suuronen’s prefabricated ‘Futuro’ house, which he designed in 1968. The Futuro house was conceived as a universally transportable holiday home that was energy- and cost-efficient and erectable in most terrains. One of the last-surviving Futuros serves as a snow-covered backdrop for the film. Two flaxen-haired models adopt various poses in and around the house. A voiceover comments, ‘I don’t know how to position her’, revealing that the women are not completely their own agents. Sequences follow of inanimate objects being strategically repositioned, as if they were pieces in a game of chess.

Working in a range of media including photography, painting, installation and video, Halonen often collaborates with ordinary people and examines their relationship to their surroundings, as well as the tension between performers and her own position as an artist. By engaging with the everyday lives of her subjects, while also alluding to historical and cultural references, Halonen aims to illustrate our need for a narrative to facilitate an understanding of the world.

Halonen’s film Glass Mountain (2008), named after a well-known Polish fairytale, features Polish construction workers in somewhat ominous costumes building a structure at the entrance of the Limerick Town Hall in Ireland. The ‘glass mountain’ they build is an unattractive edifice that seemingly has no purpose. The self-consciousness of the builders identifies them as non-actors, workers rather than performers, who become the protagonists in a film that is both choreographed and a documentary of a contrived situation.

Halonen graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College, London in 2006, following undergraduate studies at Limerick School of Art and Design. She is currently completing doctoral research at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki. Recent solo exhibitions of her work include ‘Relating that which was, towards what will be’, Huuto Gallery, Helsinki (2013); ‘We build upon Ruins of the future’, Gallery Factory, Seoul (2012); ‘Strange Place For Snow’, Korjaamo Gallery Studio, Helsinki (2010); and ‘Some Potential Scenarios’, Berwick Gymnasium Gallery, Berwick-upon-Tweed (2010). Halonen’s work has also been seen at transmediale 09, Berlin (2012); 40th Festival du nouveau cinéma, Montreal (2011); and Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale (2007).