In the Dark I Don’t Have Four Limbs

Alma Heikkilä's spatial and painterly objects materialize the entanglement of natural, cultural, social and economic aspects of agency. At the same time, agencies – from hydrocarbons to language and from fungus to infrastructures of artistic production – are co-authors of her works. Heikkilä's collaborative work with the artist Elina Tuhkanen are also presented in the exhibition. Mikko Lipiäinen has worked since 2015 in South Bahia, Brazil, with artist and activist Regis Bailux and researcher Raquel Rennó on the project Resistance Pulp. Here, he took part in organizing a series of discussions and workshops with educators of the indigenous Pataxó community. In addition to producing local pulp, the project maps and challenges practises, narratives and structures within contemporary art that are, in different ways, reproducing the repression of indigenous communities.

Arissana Pataxó approaches contemporary indigenous questions through her artistic and educational practices within the local community in South Bahia. Through her poetry, Reetta Pekkanen searches for connections between human perception, material reality and everyday moments in a time with drastic earthly changes within our living environment.

The exhibition "Pimeässä en ole neliraajainen" is in itself a paradox: Contemporary artistic practises aim to produce progressive relations across the spheres of cultures, human and non-human agencies, economies, nations and other geographical formulations. At the same time art, with its national and global infrastructures and institutions, is deeply rooted in practices and traditions that operate within and reproduce the very same differences that artistic practises are attempting to surpass. The infrastructural wealth of global north is rooted in the colonial extraction of nature-cultures.

In order to benefit from and support this still continuing extraction, artistic institutions and funding structures are reproducing a toxic, alienating view of the other in relation to geographical, cultural, material, national and economic differences. Nature-cultures, humans, non-humans, life and non-life are differentiated from each other. Institutional and display practices play a significant role in categorizing things as art works, discursive mediations, ethnographic materials or functional objects. Art, spatial structures and materiality are being distanced from social, political and ecological reality within and around of the institutions.

"Pimeässä en ole neliraajainen" is a project that acknowledges making things public as entanglements of different aspects of art works, objects, materialities, spatial structures, institutional and curatorial epistemologies. It attempts to discuss and set up this exhibitionary entanglement as a situation that challenges and moves ontological, epistemological and ethical boundaries and connections between agential aspects that are, traditionally, categorized as either nature, culture or economic factors.

The exhibition is part of Finland’s celebration of 100 years of independence in Norway. It is supported by the Finnish Norwegian Cultural Institute, Norwegian Finnish Cultural Fond, Frame Contemporary Art Finland and Arts Promotion Centre Finland.