Tense Territories

Comprising the photographs and video installations by Saskia Holmkvist, Sini Pelkki, Jussi Puikkonen, Carrie Schneider and Sauli Sirviö, the exhibition “Tense Territories” elaborated on the themes “territory” and “dominance”. Curator Aura Seikkula defined the aim of the exhibition as “Over the long period of evolutionary time, humankind has developed a most complicated array of territorial behaviours that range from personal social relationships, to possession of land and physical property. “Tense Territories” asks whether there is something imperative about territory”.

“Tense Territories” discusses how human behaviour and everyday life is questioned and interpreted by searching and finding the answer of oneself and another. Individuals maintain a multiplicity of territorial belongings that tend to push the traditional forms of identity into the background. This multiplicity leads to a problem of being conceptually undifferentiated and undefined. Identity in the sense of shared processes cannot simply be constructed or instituted as an ideology or hierarchy. It must emerge as a new tradition of argumentation, consisting in a whole diversity of interdependent territories in which and between which, the narratives are shared and traditions maintained and remade within everyone’s critical understanding, in which and between which, identities are built and selfhoods recognized and in which and between which self and the other responsively and respectively meet. Shared processes have a potentiality of being a great repository of culturally developed resources for the identities to shape and reshape. In between these shared arenas, the operating society takes its form.