TUR OCH RETUR / Video Installation / 2018 / Excerpt /

The project started with an outer event; a journey, a meeting around identity and language. One thing leads to another and the material we gathered, pictures, films and sounds, form a piece. An experimental time voyage where something has been brought to life and where the songs, melodies and conversations are an incentive to the artistic formulation. The real has become fragmentary and subjective, such as our memories most often behave. Like a sketch, a feeling.

Stephen McKenzie: Petra and Anna were finally introduced at the opening of Women don’t paint very well; a group exhibition where they were both participating artists at hangmenProjects 2016. This meeting had been talked about as far back as the year 2000. Anna at that time was writing and singing in the band Granada and Petra in her final years at KKH. Back then it was thought that Petra could make a music video for Granada, with the luxury of time it is much more fitting that they have now collaborated on the multimedia art installation Tur & Retur. From there the first encounter at hangmenProjects, they became interested in their common ground, a distant relationship to their own identity because of language. Similar feelings but from the opposing directions, Petra being Finland Swedish, growing up in Finland with Finnish as a second language and now living in Sweden speaking Swedish with a Finnish accent. Anna born in Finland but has grown up in Sweden, where her second language has become her first. An investigation into this dilemma has been the base of the collaboration. After a false start, a trip to Helsinki was organized without any clear plan, a night in a hotel and the ferry back to Stockholm.

EMPTY VESSELS / HD-VIDEO / 8 min /Excerpt /

Shot in Kathmandu, Nepal, Empty Vessels (2016) follows the path and the thoughts of climbers as they ascend one of the highest mountains in the world. The distant mountain tops are a reminder that the satisfaction of reaching one’s goal is short-lived and the thirst of climbers – and of our contemporary culture – for new thrills is unquenchable.
Petra Lindholm has been fascinated by the symbolism of mountains for many years. She has explored the impacts that mountains have on people and nature, and the topic has served as inspiration for several of her works. In 2013 Lindholm lived with her family in Nepal for a year, in conditions that were very different than what they were used to in a small town in Finland. The proximity of the Himalayas gave her the idea to interview mountain climbers in the area, and to create a fantasy of her own about ascending a mountain. The first element of the work that she completed was the music and the soundtrack on which a computer voice gives a pep talk to climbers. To add a hypnotic quality to the film, Lindholm mixed alpha waves into the soundtrack. She shot the footage later, partly on 35mm film, partly in still photographs.
Empty Vessels is an ethereal depiction of climbing and of the struggle one has to endure on the way to the top. The journey of conquest has no distinct beginning or end. The climbers interviewed by Lindholm talk about the feeling that ordinary life is not enough, and their desire to get more out of existence. In a society and an age that keep driving us forward, it is easy to become captive of competitiveness. As more and more people want to explore the farthest reaches of the world and push their boundaries, we are also putting the resilience of our planet to a very hard test. Mount Everest becomes a landfill and the region suffers from other collateral effects of tourism. The parallel of a tiny human figure in an infinite natural setting may help us see things in perspective. Why are we exhausting ourselves and our natural resources?

Text by Turku Art Museum