11.12.09 - 23.01.10

Erkka Nissinen - Rigid Regime

‘A pornographic monologue about sense certainty in Hegelian sense’ with ‘a strong home-made look and feel’

In its last show of this year, 1646 presents two new video installations by the Finnish artist Erkka Nissinen.

To grasp the nature of this artist’s grotesque, perplexing and funny videos, in a nutshell, think about what the quotations above suggest to you. Far from a simple catch phrase or plain gibberish, such is the range of the artist’s work.

In his videos, often combining acting in actual studio set with computer animation, Nissinen makes a great use of the language the media speak to us and does so by pushing to the extreme the most absurd of the elements that belong to that language. This way, the artist manages to stretch the boundaries of that vocabulary allowing anything from children’s television, soap opera, porn, and philosophy class into it and to equally make sense. Or nonsense.

Mixing the high and the low-brow, Nissinen’s works show how to mash up, through a witty and a dry gaze, sophisticated references to avant-garde, blatant obscenity and spelling exercises. While an office worker expressing his innermost desires to an animated panda bear gives way to a gooey post-blowjob sing-along or rows of singing animated flowers are followed by a penis disguised in cabbage and then mistaken for a xylophone, one cannot help thinking why plots of such kind have so seldom seemed just RIGHT.

INFO

The Opening is on Friday December the 11th at 7 pm.

The show will be on display from December the 12th till January the 23rd 2010 on Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 1 to 5 pm.

1646 will be closed for Christmas holidays from December the 19th till January the 8th 2010.