Alternative Kunstverein ACUD Kino, Berlin, April 24 and 26, 2008
Kino Svetozor, Prague, April 29 and May 28, 2008
Institut Finlandais, Paris, May 22 and 23, 2008
MOCA - Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Ar, June 8 and 11, 2008

Electric Forest presents four series of rare key works of Finnish experimental film and video art, dating from the 1960s until present, produced and organized in a collaboration between FRAME Finnish Fund for Art Exchange, Avanto Festival, Alternative Kunstverein Berlin and Night on Earth.

The first two screenings, Route Sale and Routemasters, are curated by Mika Taanila and include underground and avant-garde films from the 1960s until late 1990s. Program 1 Route Sale is dedicated entirely to the life's work of the two Finnish experimental film-makers Eino Ruutsalo and Pasi "Sleeping" Myllymäki. Program 2 Routemasters presents a series of extraordinary formal experiments entirely unencumbered by the traditional rules of cinematic narrative. The second set on the 26th of April, curated by Kari Yli-Annala, start with the late 1970s and brings us up to the current state of the art. Program 3 Humans and Electrons concentrates on the human body, its use, expressions and experience and the new cinematic relations created in the age of electronic media. The clue to Program 4 Roads and Drives is to follow the aesthetic and cultural notions of distancing, separating and re-connecting that are shared in the stories, sounds and images of these medial flows.

Eino Ruutsalo (1921-2001) of  Program 1 was a versatile visual artist whose spontaneous practice extended from oil painting to kinetic sculpture, from graphic art to cinema. In the short period between 1962 and 1967 he made number of perplexing short films he called "experimentals". They were concentrated bursts of energy whose real subject was the unmapped potential of the material itself. The direct manipulation of film stock by hand (painting, writing, etching, perforating, scratching) resulted at best in a hysterically flickering impression of a kinetic, magical motion possible only in cinema. Inspired by the do-it-yourself spirit of the punk movement while working as a graphic designer for the Iittala glassworks, Pasi Myllymäki (b. 1950) began to make short films of his own in the late 70s. With no camera of his own, Myllymäki began collaborating with Risto Laakkonen, a DIY filmmaker with an 8mm film camera. Myllymäki and Laakkonen's works were not screened at any official venues at the time, showing up only at gatherings of DIY film-makers and new wave concerts.

It was not until a group of young artists founded the Helsinki Filmmakers' Co-op in 1989 that someone finally took up the legacy of the pioneering art of Ruutsalo and Myllymäki. The key activists in the founding phase of the Co-op were the brothers Sami and Juha van Ingen, Seppo Renvall, Denise Ziegler, Marjatta Oja, Oliver Whitehead and Mikko Maasalo. In a spirit of collective enthusiasm, the Co-op produced in just a few years an amazing number of beautiful "instant movies" on celluloid. What is even more astonishing, most of them were made with on a no-budget basis on 16mm stock, using old cameras, developing equipment and an optical printer. Program 2 Routemasters offers an opportunity to see not only rare films by the Helsinki Co-op, but also a magnificent collective blast of improvisations by the young film students, Ruutsalo´s destructive testament Kinescope, and Erkki Kurenniemi, the cybernetic wizard, with his psychedelic nature fantasy Flora & Fauna. Finally Ilppo Pohjola's spectacular Routemaster brings us into the new millennium on maniac racing cars looping round and round and round.

Program 3 Humans and Electrons concentrates on the first active decades of Finnish video art. Ranging from the pioneers such as Erkki Kurenniemi and Mervi Kytösalmi to works made in the Helsinki Film Co-op, it also refers to the beginning of the "cinematic" turn in Finnish video art. This shift is characteristic of the works by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Ilppo Pohjola, Pekka Niskanen, Liisa Roberts, Salla Tykkä, Mika Taanila, Veli Granö, Liisa Lounila, Elena Näsänen and Anssi Kasitonni, among others. The clue to the screening lies in the relations between the human body, its use, expressions and experience and the new cinematic relations created in the age of electronic media.

The thread to follow in Program 4 Roads and Drives is found in the aesthetic and cultural notions of distancing, separating and re-connecting that are shared in the stories, sounds and images. The medial flows in which the works are embodied each use a different set of relations in order to re-create "the history of modern art", "the idea of art collections", "the animation film" or "the road movie". At the same time they aim at re-thinking conventional representations, as for example, of family members or religious figures. Changes in scale and proportion, too, abound. One might take Mika Taanila´s film, where the images produced by miniscule video cameras are ‘reborn' in large-scale, structuralist cinemascope.

Further information:

Curator Marita Muukkonen, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

www.frame-fund.fi, www.avantofestival.com, www.nightonearth.net