On Tuesday 24th of January we celebrate the previous SOLA festival with a free of charge program! The main festival took place at WHS Theater Union 13th-14th of May.

In Oodi will have a selected short films of the renowned Finnish experimental film maker Saara Ekström and a musical performance by Ilpo Numminen and a live-art performance by Minerva Juolahti.

Minerva Juolahti: erottuminen(–)

The performative gesture approaches the processes of differentiation and non-differentiation through body and space. The work explores how sound and image can create and disclose spaces, on the other hand make them fade out, blend into each other.

Esityksellinen ele lähestyy erottumisen sekä ei-erottumisen prosesseja kehollisuuden ja tilan kautta. Teos tutkii sitä, miten ääni ja kuva voivat toisaalta luoda ja tuoda esiin tiloja, toisaalta häivyttää niitä.

Ilpo Numminen

Synthhead Ilpo Numminen has been blasting socks off with his hypnotic cosmic comps for years now. Ilpo’s unabashed love for krautrock inflects his playful and  decidedly spaced-out musiikkia, most notably on his latest release on the  venerable Lal Lal Lal label lovably titled I Guess You Could Call This A Long Play. Ecstatic delights to warm even the coldest of continental hearts!

For Oodi library Ilpo will give a introduction how to use modular  synthesizer as an instrument, an especially the hosted in one of the studios in the library. After the presentation we will hear a special set using only the Oodi library’s modular synthesizer! 

Saara Ekström

Saara Ekström works in film, photography, text and installation. Chronotopes where time and place densify, time that nurtures and erodes, the ambivalent desire to both remember and forget are at the core of her art. Ekström’s work has been shown extensively in various museums and festivals in Europe, the Americas and Asia. She received the Finnish media art prize AVEK-award in 2018 and the prizes of SW Finland in 2017, Finnish Art Society in 1995 and the Aboa prize in 1994. She has been the Helsinki Festival Artist in 2005 and was nominated for both Ars Fennica and Carnegie Art Award prizes in 2010.

Saara Ekström: Shadow Codex (2021, HD, 12:30)

Filmed at the abandoned facilities of Turku County Prison (1835–2007), Shadow Codex documents the layers of messages drawn, burned and scratched on cell walls. The markings are pathways to the shadows of an individual’s psyche and expose an underbelly which a society both generates and hides. The 8mm film becomes the codex of a collapsed civilization and evidence of a forbidden zone in the centre of the city. The flow of images is punctuated by John Cage’s (1912–1992) composition “Perilous Night” (1964), which has been called a journey to the dark side of the soul.

Saara Ekström: Body All Eyes (2018, HD, 14:39)

Body All Eyes is a requiem for barren skies in which archaic myths of flying through time and space collide with a technological and pragmatic world. It shows a stratosphere of airplanes, drones and surveillance-satellites that are all-seeing and ever-present eyes –  a privilege that once belonged only to gods and their messengers, the birds. In the 8mm split-screen film the supernatural, mechanical, corporal and transcendental confront and embrace each other. A masked acrobat, creating a performative exchange between human and animal, leads the viewer through a torrent of images into a mysterious world, that undulates in a weightless state between heaven and earth.

Saara Ekström: Amplifier (2017, HD, 17:03)

Time inevitably moves from past to future, passing the present moment. Mankind encloses to time its marks, stains and ruins. On the verge of vast changes time acts abnormally. It leaks, folds and fractures, allowing things belonging elsewhere, to the otherworldly, topermeate itself. In the 8mm film the Helsinki Olympic Stadium represents a historical paradigm shift. Completed in 1938 the building outlines pure functionalist architecture and stands as a landmark for optimistic utopia and the oblivion on man's neglect of history.