Artist: Erkka Nissinen
Exhibition title: We have to change. These Material Conditions
Venue: Parallel Oaxaca, Mexico City, Mexico
Date: October 28 – December 3, 2016
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Parallel Oaxaca
For its inaugural exhibition at Parallel Oaxaca´s new exhibition space in Mexico City, we proudly present two artworks by Erkka Nissinen.
Erkka Nissinen´s practice combines satirical narratives and parodies of the social interactions enforced within capitalistic structures, conflating video, performance, musical storylines and philosophy. His works approach the symbolic, mental and physical spaces within today´s societies, which frame labor, action, the sense of community and even the tridimentional spaces we encounter. Erkka Nissinen ingenious characters, both theatrical actors and digital personifications, seek for subjective introspections to reveal ethical impulses for integration, meaning and abstract philosophical concepts.
In the most unlikely situations, Nissinen characters humorously construct concepts of community based on irreverent and transgressive relativisms. Frequently rejecting how social contracts prevent the ability to question reality, Nissinen characters embody an ‘annoying optimism’ posing the question of possible change and action for a society immerged in absurdity. The two works presented at Parallel Oaxaca, Mexico City Tilaa mass tilassa mass litassa maalit: ali tila (Material Conditions / Inner Spaces) (2013) and What is community (2016) balance a concurrence of semantic misunderstandings, where the incongruous and the non-sense act as an ability to reconfigure structures in our contemporaneity. The artworks construct metaphysical absurdist rhythms with the capabilities to question and test current social structures of control and logic.
Erkka Nissinen (b. 1975, Helsinki, lives and works in Hong Kong and New York), he has presented solo exhibitions at Ellen de Bruijne at Liste, de Hallen, Haarlem, Art Parcours/Art Basel, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam, M+, Hong Kong, Helsinki City Art Museum’s Kluuvi Gallery and 1646, The Hague. In 2007-2008, he was resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. In 2011 Nissinen won the Illy Prize for his video Rigid Regime during Art Rotterdam and in 2013 he received the AVEK award for media arts, Helsinki.
In 2017, Erkka Nissinen is representing Finland at the Venice Biennial, together with Nathaniel Mellors.
