Marikka Kiirikoff
Soul Camp
8 – 31 January 2021
Soul Camp refers to both a camp outside of permanent housing and the attitude with which I highlight content in my paintings. Soul Camp is an attitude through which a dystopian future turns into a utopia. It helps me deal with a situation where the frames of an old way of thinking are removed. It is over the top in all colors of the rainbow, pitch-black sorrow, dramatizing, childish, dreaming, euphoria, self-deprecation that takes itself seriously, and humor. Even if I end up on strange paths, I do it consciously.
Our time demands that we redefine our relationship with material things and experiences. Our fixation with these two and the monetary economy revolving around them have led us to an environmental disaster and a world of unpredictable natural phenomena. The necessity of change challenges and changes our way of thinking. For someone with an inflexible mindset, it is difficult to justify their actions in a culture that wastes its resources. However, painting as an age-old activity is able to provide justification for itself. Painting is a ritual from an old world, penetrating the boundaries of realities. Through the painting process, the inner emotional pressure finds a material form. In a world exhausted by materialism, painting is a dance of the spiritual and the material.
The Soul Camp exhibition at Galleria Huuto features an installation of independent paintings, a camp-like world village, a waiting room for dreams and change. In the paintings with stands made of natural wood, containing references to housing and shaped like houses, life is simple and stable, but the house is already on fire and everything is changing.
Afterword
We will take with us whatever is left. As we meet in the agreed place, we notice that we have become tough and patient like wild animals. The camp has everything we need and we can wait there. By the campfire, we agree on how to use the remedial energy that connects everything like a colored nervous system. Some people see the remedial process as a digital network, but in my dream, energy is alive and individual.
Will it happen here? Am I involved? What about you? Perhaps we will meet by a campfire, near or far, here but elsewhere if you and I start over. The past has all the mistakes but it also has all the answers.
e mistakes but it also has all the answers.
Helsinki based Marikka Kiirikoff graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki in 2002. Since then she has exhibited her art in solo exhibitions and group exhibitions both in Finland and abroad.
From the very beginning Kiirikoff’s paintings have belonged to the field of performative self portrait and they are characteristically timeless.
The exhibition has been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland
marikka.kiirikoff(a)gmail.com
www.marikkakiirikoff.fi
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