Finnish contemporary art headed for New York City

Clichés of Finnishness on view at MOMA's PS1 from June through September

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Contemporary art from Finland will be spotlighted this summer in New York.
      An exhibition entitled "TranceStates, Visions, and Hallucinations in Contemporary Finnish Art" opens on June 1st at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, an affiliate of MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art.
      The show, which features 13 artists, two groups of artists, and the Huutajat Male Voice Choir, has been put together by P.S.1's director Alanna Heiss and Marketta Seppälä , director of FRAME, The Finnish Fund for Art Exchange.
     
On display will be a range of media such as installation, video, film, photography, and painting. The show runs through the summer until September 15th.
      Some of the artists taking part will be taking advantage of certain of the classic cultural clichés supposedly associated with Finland and Finnishness, on the basis of its "Arctic" location. One such cliché is "the proximity to nature" label so often stuck onto anything remotely connected with Finland or Finnish arts.
      It is of course sometimes difficult to to say just how "Finnish" Finnish contemporary art can be in a post-national world of expanding networks and the global village.
     
P.S.1 has been in operation since 1976 in Long Island City in Queens, where there is a 100-room museum space in a former school building, and it has been in partnership with MOMA since the beginning of the millennium.
     
     
     


Links:
  FRAME: Finnish Fund for Art Exchange
  PS1 at MOMA, New York

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