Yane Calovski’s – Helsinki Photography Biennial 2014
Yane Calovski’s video essay “Hollow Land” presented at Helsinki Photography Biennial 2014
27 March 2014 – 14 May 2014
Current projects update| presentation of the video essay “Holow Land” by the artist Yane Calovski| exhibited at the L3 warehouse | Helsinki Photography Biennial 2014| curators: Basak Senova, Mustarinda Association, and Branko Franceschi.
Helsinki Photography Biennial is a series of events on photo/lens-based contemporary art that opens March 27 in Helsinki. The biennial features contemporary art from Finland and beyond, and is organized every two years in the spring. HPB14 is produced by Union of Artist Photographers / Photographic Gallery Hippolyte in collaboration with The Finnish Museum of Photography.
In 2014, the biennial aims to examine causal relations regarding ecological issues. The curatorial framework of HPB14 has been developed by Istanbul-based curator and designer Basak Senova, Finnish Mustarinda Association, and Branko Franceschi (Zagreb).
The title of the biennial, Ecological Fallacy, refers to the term ecological fallacy in statistics. It is a logical error or a mistaken assumption in the interpretation of statistical data. Derived from this analogy, the biennial questions analogous errors and assumptions, which are deliberately and systematically made by the ruling powers that violate the ecological balance of the world. In this context, Basak Senova’s curatorial framework addresses fallacies of ecological knowledge and fosters collaborative connections between ecological data and photography-based archives. The biennial seeks correlated artistic approaches and perspectives as a way of producing and processing evident critical, social and cultural discourses on these fallacies. It serves as the suture that draws the accumulated data about fallacies on ecology into visual evidences and lens-based realities. The Ecological Fallacy exhibition features 19 projects from artists around the globe.
Yane Calovski, Hollow Land, video still, 2009. Courtesy the artist and Zak Branicka Gallery, Berlin.
The exhibition at the L3 warehouse features works from Jawad Al Malhi (East Jerusalem), Marja Helander (Helsinki), Yane Calovski (Skopje) and Daniel García Andújar (Barcelona).
In a place without history, what do we remember? This is the central question behind Yane Calovki’s film “Hollow Land” (2009, 8:13 min), a video essay about Ijburg, a new city district in Amsterdam developed during the artist’s first stay on IJburg. Invited to make the district „his place“, „Hollow Land” refers to Jean-Luc Godard’s short film about Lausanne, “Letter to Freddy Buache,” and its articulated impossibility of representing all facets of a city. ‘Hollow Land’ is a feature film – structured as an exploration project – incorporating writing, performing and filming of an original script, producing printed matter, music score, focusing on a character’s fascination with a geographical-historical emptiness of a place. Caught in a moment of flux, identified still with unfinished and suspended structures, IJburg is a location that could easily be appropriated as a film set where the entire production could happen without disturbing the ‘normality’ of the already existing life. The project has a strong performative character, structured as an exploration and incorporating writing, performing and filming of an original script, producing printed materials, music score, and finally taking the film apart and distributing it in various forms and contexts. Calovski’s work is a “conspiracy inflicted – self defining drama” revisiting characters of his previous film projects and inserting them in the social space of IJburg to provoke an interactive form of exchange with the socio-political and economic subterfuge on the island.
Reflecting both on the ideology of self-realisation and identifying with urban codes and postulates, the script will chart an unorthodox map of fused elements and theories, concluding that the illusion of the politically projected concept of new urbanity overpowers the reality of social expectation. The conclusion: “Fiction is necessity.”
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