Installation “My Mind’s Eye and Thickening Skin”
Antti Juhani Ahonen & Heidi Seppälä
An installation work combining sculpture and dance film. The piece deals with emotional loss, loneliness and the fear of losing oneself.
The exhibition is realized in an old department store property measuring approx. 3900m2 in cooperation with the city of Kerava and the owner of the property, OP Kiinteistösijoitus Oy.
Purkutaide (“Demolition art”) has implemented 10 different art and cultural events in
properties awaiting demolition since 2016. During the Covid-19 summers of 2020 & 2021,
a total of 50,000 visitors came to experience the latest art exhibition, “The Home of Art”, in
an empty apartment building in Keravala. “Ihmemaa X” (Wonderland X) exhibition will
operate in barrier-free premises of several thousand square meters, along with better
transport connections than before and so the expectation is to reach a significant
audience.
The soundscape of the installation is created by a British performer, composer and artist Alwynne Pritchard
https://www.purkutaide.com/ihmemaa-x/
Heidi Seppälä left Finland at the age of 17 in search of the experience of freedom, the illusion of which echoes throughout Europe in each of her works. With ambition as her guide, she has spent almost twenty years changing country, landscape and challenge from one project to the next, seeking the deepest potential of art by drawing on different cultural environments.
We both escaped our own histories in order to work, to make art. Antti’s manic search for truth in the recesses of his mind, in the workshop and in the literary classics, and Heidi’s compulsive need to explore the ways in which people and cultures get along and love, both culminate in delusional periods of mental exhaustion and a thirst for freedom.
We collided at the start of our careers in 2006. We went our separate ways, only to return together eighteen years later, enriched by life. Antti had traded his angle grinder for late morning coffee in the company of sparrows, Heidi was practising silence on long meditation retreats. We stayed in each other’s shelter, a place where the ghosts of the past can be greeted in safety. “
