20.09.2010, 5:30 p.m.
We have kept daily video records of our life at home and abroad since March 1990. The total footage has reached 1200 hours. In Asking for Advice we take our material back to its ordinary context: to share the video clips with the people whom we visit and who visit us. The performance project started at Laznia in August 2005. We were then confused with our thousand hours of home videos, and we literally asked what to do with it. Now we have returned to show, how we have used your advice in editing our work. We hope you enjoy it.
During the five years between then and now, we have developed a method we call Generational Filming. It is a method of watching and commenting on our home videos with different age groups, different specialists, and other viewers with different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. These discussions are filmed, and added to the next edition as a new generation of the video to be shown to other audiences. We ask your permission to show your comments to other audiences.
The video clips we share with you have a focus in the relationship between living creatures and the space. Home space is constructed by movement rhythms and stoppages, making visible the two-directional relationship that moulds the inhabitant to his or her dwelling and vice versa. These clips are concerned of the subtle, usually unnoticed, power struggle of occupying and controlling home space.
Duration: about two hours (or as long as you enjoy watching and discussing with us).
Since the early 1980s Lea and Pekka Kantonen have been involved in co-operation with other artists, schools, museums and different communities both locally and internationally. They are simultaneously working with various projects dealing with similar issues, combining art with fieldwork, teaching, research and political action. In these open ended co-operative projects both mediums and goals are discussed. Exhibitions, screenings and other presentations provide feedback on the ongoing processes – a means of continuous methodological revision and conversation. The different methods of engaging audience as partners in an ongoing dialogue include Artist´s Fieldwork, Translation Tours, Generational Filming, and Asking for Advice.
Their work shown in Poland:
2000
Encounters, (solo show) Laznia, Centre for Contemporary Art in Gdansk, Poland
2000
Mother, (performance) BWA Gallery, Zielona Gora, Poland
Mother, (performance) Castle of Imagination -festival in Laznia, Centre for Contemporary Art in Gdansk, Poland
1998
Sources, (group project) Centre of Polish Sculpture in Oronsko, Poland
1996
Every Moment, (solo show) Wyspa Gallery, Gdansk, Poland
www.kantonenart.com [Attention! The page opens in a new tab.]