Framework: The Finnish Art Review
Issue 11 Jan '10: Horror Vacui

Issue 11 serves as the publication for the touring exhibition Horror Vacui with works by Markus Copper, Kimmo Schroderus and Jari Haanperä, and offers with its articles a larger platform for the thematics of the exhibition.

What is “nothing”? Though the question may seem simple, it is difficult to answer. But as Chuck Dyke, Patricia Reed and Ville Lähde in their essays of this issue discuss, the problem fades off when we locate the question in appropriate contrasts. The antonym of 'nothing' is not 'anything' but 'something.' The thing to do next is to specify which 'something' is at stake.

The quintessential 'nothing' in a historical perspective would be a world without divine order (later God, and later still ”Man”). This, of course, is still with us, carried along by the stubborn belief that ultimately nothing fateful can happen to us – human existence has transcendental guarantees. Carried to the completion, this belief prepares the way for the situation in which we really have nothing left, Chuck Dyke notes.

Something and nothing are in a close companionship. Nothing is always necessary for creating something, whatever the field we are looking at. If the astrophysicists know what they are talking about, this principle is literally true of the origin of the universe, too. The essayists of this issue take up other examples. In addition, the history of mathematics provides a good one: modern mathematics leans on a precise definition of its own nothing, namely zero. As a mark and as a symbol, zero definitely is a 'something', but compared with other numbers it is a 'nothing'.

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Markus Copper, Jari Haanperä and Kimmo Schroderus faced their fear of empty spaces and created with their individual works an entity which defiantly filled the museum space by means of light, sound, mechanical movement, motorized structures and sculptural objects. The metal limbs of Schroderus’ works stretched in every direction to the depth of twenty meters. Copper’s sculptures were like live machines that challenged us to deal with the relationship between man and technology in the border states between life and death. The moving images of Haanperä’s works supported the existing and the invisible with reflections and shadows.

The exhibition was on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki from May 15 through August 8, 2009 and was part of a collaboration between Kiasma and FRAME. Framework warmly thanks the artists and team of the exhibition and the authors of the articles.