Artist: Ola Vasiljeva
Exhibition title: Long Farewells
Venue: Pori Art Museum, Pori, Finland
Date: March 20 – August 30, 2020
Photography: Erkki Valli-Jaakola / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Pori Art Museum
“Long Farewells” engages with the Pori Art Museum primarily through its architectural ancestry. Formerly a weigh house, the building in the town port had a transitive, measuring, evaluating function. It was a threshold space, made for the passage of goods, for their transition via a temporary halt, display and estimation.
As if subjected to a similar transition, Vasiljeva’s artworks are passersby in this liminal space. The exhibition, consisting of a multi-layered arrangement of artifacts, materials, and media, brings together works, old and new, and echoes the artist’s longstanding interest in the relationship between display and backstage — that is, the relationship between the displayed and the allegedly never displayed.
