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Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #8

SITE • BODY • ARCHITECTURE

Mobilizing The Still Image In Hannu Karjalainen’s Video Art

Hannu Karjalainen in dialogue with Hu Sang

14th DECEMBER 2014

At Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

MOMENTUM Berlin and Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai are proud to present the collaborative project: Time_Art_Impact, a year-long education program of dialogues between media artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and key figures from the Shanghai art scene. Time_Art_Impact is the inaugural program of the new Media Library at Minsheng Art Museum, which will use the MOMENTUM Collection of international video art as a basis for a series of monthly cross-cultural dialogues via live-stream between Berlin, Shanghai and the rest of the world.

Finnish-born, Berlin-based artist Hannu Karjalainen develops his video practice from a grounding in photography and his training in the Helsinki School. Woman on the Beach is a photograph activated into a subtle poetic motion, rewarding the viewer for taking the time to watch it unfold. In subsequent work Karjalainen uses the medium of the moving image to reflect back upon painting and the material qualities of paint. Colour is an elusive subject matter. It is intangible and abstract as much as it is coded, branded and harnessed for different purposes. Hannu Karjalainen is particularly interested in how meaning is attributed to a colour, and how this mechanism can be exploited by re-contextualization, using colour and its supposed meaning as a critical tool to investigate the world around us. In an ongoing series of works that turn classical portrait photographs into moving color palettes, Karjalainen again mobilizes the traditionally still image. Looking at painting through photography, its role becomes reversed.

Hu Sang is a Shanghai-based poet and critic. Currently pursuing a PhD in Philosophy from Tongji University, Hu has published in various journals and books, including Shan Hua, Shu Cheng, Poetry Journal, Poetry Monthly, Shanghai Literature and Shanghai Cultural.

WATCH THE TALK: