there is another
way & Heritage
27 may – 24 september
The passage of time is the common thread in Juopperi’s multimedia works. The exhibition at Havremagasinet consists of two installations. The installation There Is Another Way examines and depicts the dramatic impact of hydropower on landscape, nature, communities and people’s way of life. An amateur video depicts enthusiastic tourists visiting the massive Three Gorges Dam in China, the largest hydroelectric dam in the world when it opened in 2010. This controversial hydroelectric project is contrasted with the story of the dams built in the early 1900s near the mouth of the Elwha River on the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe’s land, located in Washington State, USA. The hydropower flooded sacred sites and settlements and nearly eliminated the salmon fishing that had been the Elwha’s main source of livelihood and a central cultural identity and practice. In a rich audio work, the history of the Elwha tribe is told through interviews that recount the years of resistance (especially by the tribe’s older women), which eventually resulted in the demolition of the dam structures. The river and its surroundings are now a major eco-logical restoration project with signs of salmon recovery and the Elwha people feel they have regained their identity.
In Heritage, Juopperi aims to create a cube-shaped sculpture, an archive, and a performance piece with hundreds of hand-woven tapestries (ranas) collected by the artist since 2000. The work is a commentary on minimalist art (known to be very masculine) and an homage to the care and work invested in everyday crafts by hundreds of anonymous women in northern Finland and Sweden that weave them. Heritage installation quotes Tony Smith’s minimalist sculpture Die (1962), a steel cube with side sizes of 180 cm, a dimension taken from Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing The Vitruvian Man. Heritage is also a metaphor for history, where the stacked textiles are likened to the materialization of time in the layers of the earth. Heritage is created anew as a sculpture each time it is installed. The work does not have a final form and each presentation is thus a new manifestation of the archive of woven tapestries that Heritage also is. Each rana is unique and tells its own story, representing a family, a village, an era, but brought together in Heritage they also form a larger collective.
About the artist
Elina Juopperi was born and raised in northern Finland, where she now lives and works. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy in Paris, 2005. With his own background as a reference, she likes to emphasize the importance of working both in the cultural metropolises and in more peripheral contexts. Juopperi works in many media, including photography, video, drawing and installations. Juopperi has participated in exhibitions internationally in Finland, France, Mexico and Ecuador, among others. She has received grants from the Kone Foundation, the Arts Promotion Center Finland, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, and the Alfred Kordelin Foundation.
