Illustration by Irina Kreer-Boulay.

My Childhood

Alejandro Olarte | Arlene Tucker | Irina Kreer-Boulay | Josef Ka | Outi Korhonen | Rosamaría Bolom | Zahrah Ehsan

This exhibition is a multidisciplinary and multicultural experience for children, young people and families. It gathers stories of childhood created by transcultural artists living and working in Finland. Within the exhibition childhood relates to culture, identity and diversity. The meaningful and experiential stories find varied and experimental forms within the selected artworks – in the exhibition you may find a work that maps family ties with hair and a collection of lullabies in nearly forty different languages.

My Childhood exhibition is a collaboration between Annantalo Arts Centre and Catalysti. The exhibition was curated via an Open Call for Catalysti member artists in October 2020. The exhibition is produced and curated by curator Anna Puhakka and Harri Piispanen from the Annantalo Arts Centre, and Paola Livorsi and Tatiana Solovieva from Catalysti.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

As a child Rosamaría Bolom thought of puzzles as overly complicated objects. Later on that led to a discovery that making art can actually be similar to assembling puzzles. Bolom’s work Assembling Memories invites participants to an intuitive play of assembling shapes and colors.

Zahrah Ehsan’s site-specific work The sky Looks the Same On the Other Side reflects on the space as well as the artist creating narration of images. The work is realized directly on the gallery windows challenging the notion that the grass would be any greener on the other side.

Josef Ka’s Sandbox is an installation and a performance that welcomes you back to childhood memories. During the opening performance the artist plays in the sandbox together with children from a vintage film shot nearly a hundred years ago.

Irina Kreer-Boulay is interested in cultural identity, multiculturalism, cultural stereotypes and clichés. In her work The Birth of a Personality this is represented by a traditional Russian doll matryoshka – as a multi-layered object it can also be seen as an allegory of multiple cultural identities that coexists within one.

(UN)REST, an installation by Alejandro Olarte and Outi Korhonen, consists of nearly 40 lullabies in different languages that transmit both rest and unrest. The listener can choose to listen to the songs individually or as a mass of simultaneously repeating chaos of melodies.

Arlene Tucker’s work is a part of a quest towards understanding herself and her family. Hair Tree explores trust, genetics, and mapping in reflection to “Who is in my family?”. It seeks ways to reflect, reveal, and reconnect to one’s identity and belonging in the world. Hair tree is a way of mapping one’s family through intertwined locks of hair.

FAMILY DAY:

The exhibition includes a Family Day at Annantalo, on Sunday 24th of October, from 11.00 – 16.00, with the following activities:

• Alejandro Olarte & Outi Korhonen will present a workshop about lullabies in different languages, connected with the sound installation Un(Rest);
• a performance by Josef Ka in the installation Sandbox;
• a participatory performance for families by Olga Spyropoulou & H. M. Ouramo, titled Next to Kin.

ALL INFO:

My Childhood will take place on the first floor of the main gallery.

• Free entry
• Location:
  Annantalo
  Annankatu 30
  00100 Helsinki
  (Google Maps link)
• Dates:
  14.10 – 19.12
  Opening: 13.10, 17.00
  Family day: 24.10
• Opening times:
  Mon – Fri 9.00 – 20.00
  Sat 10.00 – 16.00
  Sun closed
  Note that the café is closed.
• Age recommendation: 6+
• Language: Finnish, Swedish, English, Russian

The My Childhood event on the Annantalo website can be found here.

My Childhood and the accompanying Family Day are supported by the Taike Arts Promotion Centre.