ARTFORUM, Summer issue 2009

By Roger Jones

Juhana Kristian Moisander

Kluuvin Galleria

Juhana Kristian Moisander´s exhibition ”kiiras” is a case study in religious conviction – a topic that contemporary artists seldom broach, apparently seeing it as an intrusion on our properly secular ethos. The show´s Finnish title refers to an evil spirit, a contrivance between pagan and Christian beliefs, which Finns ceremoniously chase away every Easter. The exhibition ended with Holy Week, closing on Easter Day. Embedding his project within this season sacred to Chritians, Moisander presented a drama in which love, desperation and faith demand our attention and charge our emotions; kiiras, it is important to note, can also be translated as ”purgatory”.
  The gallery was dim; three black and white video projections simultaneously presented threads of the same story. The central image depicts a man in a dark cloud. His arms and legs are willowy with movement, but we only see him from his neck down- beginning where the wall meets the ceiling- so he seems to float above the gallery`s floor. His airy hovering looks elegant, even tranquilizing, once you´ve noticed there is no hint of struggle. He is somnolently suspended in a space he is powerless to leave. This, it seems, is purgatory.
  The projection on the right showed a closed suitcase; on the left, a closed door. With a few sharp raps at the door, the drama begins. The door opens onto a snow-covered landscape; a young woman in standing there. She slowly kneels in hushed, earnest prayer; then, with a clattering sound the suitcase flips open. You don´t see it open, because your eyes have been fixed on her, but when you whirl toward the racket, there it is. A man gradually rises from the suitcase – a droll levitation trick or holy ascension? While gazing lovingly toward the kneeling woman, he reaches out to her tenderly, and you realize that the suitcase man and the fellow adrift in purgatory are the same person.
  Nearly risen from his suitcase-tomb, the man appears to have reached salvation and the woman´s prayers to have been heard. But Moisander´s story doesn´t end so neatly. At a dramatic turning point, the man makes such passionate imploring gestures that you can´t help but glance back at the woman to look for her response. In a twisted deus ex machina, the figure of death has arrived out of nowhere, standing just behind the woman still petitioning in prayer. Like her, your attension has been focused  on the man; you didn´t notice death´s approach either. Death places a hand on her shoulder, the man falls back into the suitcase, and the tragedy comes to its real ending.
  I have no idea if Moisander walks among the faithful, but kiiras, 2009, is exceptional in its capacity to render devotion in secular age. Moisander is gifted dramatist and a actor ( he plays most of the parts ); his minimalist, elegiac approach delicately restores the intricate commerce between faith and emotion. His style of pantomime movement and gesture is ingeniously integrated with his sound design. And unlike most videoartist, he is succinct, a consummate editor. He subtly unites his audience with characters at momentous turning points in the dreamy, present-tense drama – you didn´t see the death coming either. It´s an opening to contemplate spirituality, whether skeptically or as a believer. We have faith in Moisander´s art, because it´s clear he believes in the inner life of his characters  and in their spirituality, too.

 

 

 

A visit to the kingdom of shadows

In Juhana Moisander’s installations, videos and photographs, a dim space is constructed in which history, memory and fantasy meet. When constructing his fantasy-world meeting venues, Moisander often uses himself as a model, in the manner of American photographic artist, Cindy Sherman. Like Sherman, he conceals his own body in suits, masks and other paraphernalia. For example in his work Mummosusi (granny wolf) (2006, loopvideo), the artist is rocking gently in a rocking chair in a cabin, dressed in a headscarf and long boots, with a wolf mask on his face. In this hybrid character, the theme of relatives and family is combined in combined with images from folklore and mythical knowledge.

The basis of the video installation on display in a private exhibition in the Titanik Gallery in Turku, Babajaga (2008), was a scary folklore witch living in the forest, who is also known as a frightening keeper of secret knowledge. The character swung before the viewer in a mortar, which folklore describes as moving through the air. A powerful world of sound depicted Babajaga’s defiance. The exhibition also contained a series of photographs, in which Moisander referred more broadly to supernatural events told of in folklore. These depict miraculous acts such as the turning of arable land by invisible hands.

In the work on display at Turku Biennial, Moisander’s starting point is a more earthly subject, which is endowed with a mythical remoteness merely through the passage of time and a certain theme of withdrawal. The basis of the work is the life of a bourgeois family well-known in Turku history, although instead of reconstruction or dramatised documentation, it is more a question of imagination.

The work is located in a classic baroque-style house built in the 1920s on the banks of the River Aura, the so-called Rettig Palace, and the home of the von Rettig family, who had moved from Sweden to Turku. The family, which owned a tobacco factory and steamship company, did not crave publicity, and wanted to spend their time in peace.

Moisander has researched the house and its history when planning his video projections, which act as a distant reminder of the life that was concealed behind the walls of the building. The projections show a moment after a meal, where members of the family are spending time on their own.

The positions are based on the 19th century family model. As the men smoke cigars and drink cognac, the children play and a woman drinks tea. Although the basis of the characters, dressed in clothing typical of the turn of the 19th century, is the life if the von Rettig family within the walls of their ‘palace’, the situations and characters are invented.

Moisander’s moving picture works bring to mind a description once written in a newspaper article by Russian author, Maxim Gorky, of an early cinema presentation. After his experience of cinema, Gorky wrote that he had visited a ‘kingdom of shadows’. Standing in front of Moisander’s works, you too can sometimes almost think that you have encountered a ghost. The use of a single take reminiscent of early cinematic practice emphasises the impression of a strange encounter.

With Moisander, the ghostly encounter is often connected with a small, barely perceptible movement, in spite of the fact that the composition of the works seems rather to suggest a motionless still image stopped as the natural state of the pictures. The phantom-like quality of the works brings to mind fantasies historically related to a photograph-based medium. It is a question of the possibility of using a photograph and a moving image to make invisible things visible and the characters of dead people permanent.

In its time, the photograph had a mystic aura as a new instrument in the sphere of picture production. Because of the mummified nature of the camera, ‘spirit photography’ was created, which embodied strange practices like taking morbid family portraits of clothed, recently deceased relatives.

History creates characters through documents, literature, folklore and memory. History is also a temporal continuum running right up to the present day and populated by both the living and the dead, and during which we, the people living now, will one day be transferred ‘from time to eternity’. So in old photographs and films, the power of documentary evidence is combined in the unreal. The pictures exorcise ghosts and ghosts themselves ask to be exorcised, the camera building paths, like wormholes, between different worlds. Moisander's pictures catch this ghostliness in an enchanting way, which even some 'spirit photographers’ might envy.

Kari Yli-Annala, translated by Tim Glogan, from the catalogue of Turkubiennal 2009

It is impossible to prove that all ravens are black. 
Suppose that we check a hundred thousand ravens and find that they are all black. 
This is still no proof that all ravens are black. If, however, we should find one white raven among the hundred thousand, this is a proof that not all ravens are black.
 An example of Karl Popper’s theory on scientific hypotheses

Once upon a Time…

…there was an artist called Juhana Moisander
who showed his art at Babel from the 3rd to the 12th of October 2008...
Juhana Moisander has found the white raven. His fairy-tale world is more about mystical transcendence than scientific theories. In this universe anything goes. In his art Juhana draws on a rich assortment of folklore, myths and magic. Like in a fairy tale, he works impulsively and by intuition. Only in retrospect is he able to explain what initially appears incomprehensible. Confusing labyrinths and interconnecting cobwebs gradually appear when he steps back and takes a look at his work. The works often deal with invisible boundaries between man and beast, life and death, the visible and the invisible. In his attempts to visualise the unseen, he chooses whatever medium he finds suitable - he models, photographs and makes films.
The exhibition is affected by the dramatic sound from the video that Juhana made after having spent a couple of days and nights in local forests. During this hike, he discovered that a large majority of the fly agarics he passed by had been trampled down and destroyed. Was this a kind of superstitious ritual against bad luck or evil? In the video we see a magnificent fly agaric. A tiny masked guy (a forest devil?) angrily jumps up and down in slow motion. The mushroom is twice his height; he is like some character from Alice in Wonderland. Or he might have fitted in perfectly in the absurd ambiance of Twin Peaks. Please note the devil’s boots…
…And proceed to the exhibited photos. The artist himself is the active protagonist of four scenes that seem to be part of the same narrative. But what is the story? You get the impression that it’s about a search for knowledge or magical power. Apparently, the artist finds what he’s looking for, and you see him perform the inexplicable. Note the background extras in the photographed incidents…
…And then turn around. Eighteen ravens appear from the wall, as random chess squares against the white background, or as positive negatives, watching you arrogantly and all-knowingly. The mythological history of the raven is complex and changing. A common trait in many cultures, though, is the raven’s messenger function. The intelligent bird carefully observes its surroundings. It is a scavenging bird constantly in contact with death. Mystical stories about humans taking on a raven shape and flying about at night abound – and also the opposite: stories about ravens becoming human.
The exception from the assumption that all ravens are black is found on a wall set aside from the dark hoard of birds. Wait a minute – isn’t that bird breathing? A red bellows on the bird’s abdomen moves in time with its breathing, as if by a miracle. It is vulnerable and exposed. The black ones are envious and may puncture its bellows with their beaks at any time. But so far they have left it alone. Juhana Moisander wants to show us the exceptions, the white raven among the thousands of black ones: the single individual refuting that the world is as we assume it to be.

Solveig Lønmo 
Translated by Birgit Kvamme Lundhei, from the Babel exhibition, Trondheim, Norway, 2008.