Building Bodies: Pia Männikkö & Lior Tamim

Thursday December 3 from 6–9 pm

Triangle Arts Association, 20 Jay Street, Suite 318, Brooklyn, NY, 11201

Triangle artists-in-residence Pia Männikkö and Lior Tamim invite you into their studios to see works-in-progress that explore the limits of the human form. Männikkö constructs installations and photo collages that document and abstract the body as organic entity. Her practice explores the presence of the physical form as well as its interaction with the surrounding environment. Tamim transforms his studio into a vibrant red cube which serves as backdrop for an ongoing performance of the artist as body-builder. His collaborative and site-specific installation negotiates complex questions about masculinity and power. Realized during their residencies at Triangle, the works on view by these two artists ask us to ultimately consider the body as malleable material.

Pia Männikkö graduated from the Glasgow School of Art’s Sculpture and Environmental Art Department in 2010 and earned an MFA in Sculpture from the Finnish Art Academy in 2014. Her materials and methods are diverse—from everyday objects, textiles and clay to photography and video. Männikkö´s installations and sculptures have been presented in various exhibitions and art happenings, among others Mänttä Art Festival and Rovaniemi Art Museum in Finland, OpenART biennale in Örebro, Sweden, Armory Gallery in Sydney, Australia, Kraftwerk der Rathenau-Hallen, Berlin, Germany and The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, Scotland.  Männikkö is an artist-in-residence at Triangle Arts Association through the support of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York. www.piamannikko.com

Lior Tamim is a visual artist living and working in New York City whose projects are installation-based and site specific, as each dictate unique rules and methodologies. He incorporates a wide variety of media including photography, video, performance, painting, and sculpture. He studied art and photography at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design Jerusalem and at Parsons, The New School, New York. Tamim is currently training to be a body-builder while he is in residence at Triangle from November—December 2015. www.liortamim.com

Triangle Arts Association is a NYC based non-profit arts organization founded in 1982 to support international and U.S. artists. Triangle’s core initiatives: Residencies, Workshops and Public Programs are centered on dialogue, experimentation and the creation of community around art. www.triangle-arts-association.org

Image: Pia Männikkö and Lior Tamim, Building Bodies, 2015.

My bag is packed ready for traveling to New York! The Finnish Cultural Institute in New York operates in the fields of contemporary art, design and architecture, creating dialogue between Finnish and American professionals and audiences. Organized by FCINY, I will be participating in the Triangle Residency located in Dumbo, Brooklyn, spending my 3-month residency period in New York in October–December 2015 as a part of Triangle’s international network of professional artists.

“For Pia Männikkö’s artistic practice the concepts of body and space are not only mere starting points, something from which something else may be found, experimented, and contested. They are the primary concepts that establish the ontology of her art, and through which all the decisions and details can be grounded and understood…”  Read the full artist introduction at FCINY´s site.

One of my plans for the recidency is to continue working with photograph series Tenses.

The Chekhov Machine is a collective that comprises of artists from various disciplines who have committed themselves to the play Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov. The collective creates new events and performances depending on the available space, time and possibilities. Each performance is a poetic improvisation on space and time – a site-specific live installation that deals with themes such as anxiety, ambivalence, sadness, longing, imprisonment and the feelings of being an outsider.

I have been a member of the group since January 2015. I plan visuality for our performances, and I also perform as a live set designer during our shows. Next performances are at Mad House Helsinki, October 1st, 2nd and 3rd 2015 at 7pm. Welcome! More info: https://www.facebook.com/chekhovmachine

I spent beautiful summer days last week in Harviala Mansion, an hour drive north from Helsinki. There was an international artist symposium Spirited Mansion. We worked for six days making installations, land art, photographs, paintings etc. in the mansion´s gallery and other buildings. Artists: Aya Imamura, Salla Laurinolli, Andris Makarockovskis, Pia Männikkö, Patricia Pisani, Agita Steinberga, Katri Stenberg and Anssi Taulu. The exhibition in open during happenings and by appointment till the end of September.

Pia Männikkö: Searchers, 2015. Found objects, motors, lights and sound.

OpenART, Scandinavia’s biggest public art biennial, opens again in two days! I was in Örebro in 2013 when that beautiful small town was filled with art the previous time, I had four works in the biennial. Here below are images of my 2013 works. You can find them also in OpenArt 2013 archive: Déjà Vu, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Tempo and Tenses (texts in Swedish). I definitely recommend a visit to OpenART if your adventures take you to Sweden this summer.

Tempo, 2013, ink drawings on paper and tulle fabric, 3 m x 3 m x 3 m,  Stortorget square

Tenses, 2013, (detail) pigment print, 228 cm x 135 cm, Vågen KonstRUM.

Midsummer Night´s Dream, 2013, rescue blankets and fans, 12 m x 12 m, Örebro County Museum.

Déjà Vu, 2013, tulle fabric and ink, Örebro County Museum

My first show of the year is opening next week in Gallery Oksasenkatu11 in Helsinki! Tracing performance -exhibition will have artworks in which an act of performance has been a vital part of the working process, and works that have been inspired by a performance, resulting in a new piece of art.
Tracing performance artists: Liisa Ahlfors / Outimaija Hakala / Meri Hietala & Antti Ahonen / Katri Kainulainen & Antti Ahonen / Karolina Kucia / Maximilian Latva / Pia Männikkö / Tuomo Rainio.
Open 18.2.-1.3.2015. Tue-Fri at 3-7pm, sat-sun at 1-5pm. Welcome!

Stratum, unfired clay and wood. (Image from previous version, new sculpture will be made at Oksasenkatu11 gallery.)

Published by Highlike.org in the end of 2014, this hard cover book is a compilation of many contemporary artists working in unique ways and with atypical materials. I am pleased to have my work Déjà Vu included in this book.

“FILE – Electronic Language International Festival and SESI publishing house launch the “highlike book”. This is a yearbook on global contemporary ART and CULTURE. Its first edition has 584 pages with 577 artists from 35 countries. The “highlike book” encompasses several aspects of contemporary culture, providing the user a new form of appreciation of an art book. This is a book connected to the cloud. All information, images, videos and texts, is connected to their on-line counterparts in several languages, in a hybrid book which maintains its physical aspects and the virtual simultaneity of multimedia information. Its main purpose is to provide users with a new way of access culture in a global diversified view on the contemporary creativity in its transversal and heuristic aspect, by means of technologies currently available.”

Mänttä Art Festival is the largest annual contemporary art exhibition in Finland. It was first arranged in 1993.  The main venue is Pekilo, a former industrial building, with all of its four floors renovated into an art space.  This year the curator was Minna Joenniemi, who invited 60 artists to the exhibition.

I had two works in Pekilo, a 4,5 meters long photograph Tenses, and a new version of masking tape sculpture Some people knit, pictured below.

This summer I was a guest artist with a German artist group Endmoräne. We built an exhibition Darned Stich Up in an old Veritas sewing machine factory in Wittenberge. Here are some images of my works in the exhibition: