Events > Event

14 May 2013

Anni Puolakka & Jenna Sutela: Nearness

Time
7:00pm - 9:0

Nearness is a networking event between a group of actors:

Anyone and anything that happens to be around
A projector campfire and a meeting room camp
Rune-songs and presentation lingo

A performative lecture and a set of interconnecting gowns links the attendants together with each other and their surroundings. The event is hosted by designers/artists Anni Puolakka and Jenna Sutela, in collaboration with fashion designer K.I. Kinnunen. Their take on networking is an immediate and material one, minimizing premeditation and endorsing chance.

Anni Puolakka produces visual and written work with a focus on the political, urban and poetic. Having a background in graphic design, her current projects engage with asylum seekers in Helsinki as well as subtle modes of debate within and for the public space.

Jenna Sutela’s writing and curatorial projects seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments — most recently, the physical nature of information networks and the relationship of art to work. Her background is in media studies.

Together they have self–published several titles and created events and installations at the edges of design as OK Do. These have been presented at, for example, Kunsthalle Helsinki, Index — The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, and X Marks the Bökship in London. Like their previous written pieces, distributed around the world in printed format, Puolakka and Sutela view Nearness as a publication, only this time a recited one.

K.I. Kinnunen is a designer in the fields of fashion and costume. She has worked in Parisian fashion houses, such as Balenciaga, and collaborated with contemporary dance groups, like Helsinki Dance Company. Kinnunen’s gowns for Nearness explore the relationship between brief encounters and grand movements.

Image

Anni Puolakka & Jenna Sutela: Nearness.

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