Closer: Landing Prohibited
Arter invites viewers to have a closer look into Maaria Wirkkala’s multi-part installation titled "Landing Prohibited".
Landing ProhibitedArter
Landing Prohibited
Maaria Wirkkala’s installation Landing Prohibited, produced for the Finnish Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 and acquired by the Arter Collection the same year after its display in Venice, met the audience for the first time in Istanbul in September 2024.
Landing ProhibitedArter
The exhibition Landing Prohibited, curated by Nilüfer Şaşmazer and held between 19.09.2024–23.02.2025, interweaves the artist's personal history and memories with enduring socio-political issues through a reinterpretation of the original installation for Arter's gallery space.
Landing ProhibitedArter
The artist, who spent her childhood not only in her homeland Finland’s Helsinki in the south, and Lapland in the north, but also Venice in Italy, positions the ever-shifting elements of these geographies, such as water, air and light, at the centre of her practice.
Landing ProhibitedArter
“There are certain fetish objects which Maaria always returns to, bestowing new meanings upon them each and every time."...
..."Chief among them are chairs, boats, ladders, glass of different sorts, and sources of light; and each acts as a vessel of transference which both strengthens the feeling of standing on a threshold and at the same time teleports us to other worlds.” - Nilüfer Şaşmazer
Landing ProhibitedArter
Landing Prohibited consists of a ‘sea’ of broken glass…
a traditional Venetian boat – sandolo – filled with water and gently rocking amidst this ‘sea’…
a glass ladder suspended from the ceiling…
and a solitary oar resting against the wall.
Landing ProhibitedArter
The fragments of broken glass, used by the artist to create a rough, treacherous sea that makes it impossible to reach the shore, come from the Venini Glass Factory on the island of Murano in Venice, where her father Tapio Wirkkala worked as a glass designer starting in the mid-60's.
Inspired by the "landing prohibited" warning sign, frequently placed along the Venetian canals, Maaria Wirkkala draws a parallel between this phrase and the anti-immigrant stance that prevails in many parts of the world, and references the perilous sea journeys undertaken by immigrants, which often end in tragedy.
Landing ProhibitedArter
Şaşmazer interprets the elements of the installation as follows: "Wirkkala takes the glass, normally a product mass-manufactured merely for functional use, and foregrounds its fragility; creating the image of a fabled sea in whose semi-opaque body and shards of light the viewers might find themselves lost."
"After all, glass, too, is a solidified liquid. And in the context of this piece, the shards of glass come to symbolize the fragments of petrified and broken dreams.”
Landing ProhibitedArter
“Another fundamental element of the installation, the glass ladder, serves as a kind of axis mundi connecting earth and sky. This object, both ordinary and magical, connects different worlds, transporting us beyond the limits of time and space.”
Landing ProhibitedArter
“Among the additions that Maaria made to Landing Prohibited for its exhibition in Istanbul is the single oar. The single oar, the arm of the boat-body, can be considered a tool for staying alive; as a limb, it allows for hunting, gathering, eating.”
Landing ProhibitedArter
“Despite this vital potential it carries, the oar is placed within what Gaston Bachelard calls a ‘vegetable double’-a burnt wooden box, looking almost like a coffin.”
Landing ProhibitedArter
To end the story we borrow the words that the artist wrote 20 years ago in her diary, upon reading the news about migrants whose boats had capsized while trying to reach the Italian coast:
Landing ProhibitedArter
“State of things exists in spite of me. To work with what I see and what I do not want to see. What happens and what I don’t want to know about.” (Maaria Wirkkala, Vietato Lo Sbarco: Landing Prohibited (Tabulava Art Books, 2007), p. 20.)
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