Travel films have an established format with their own conventions, history and baggage. It is a medium that has all too often sought to control, define and dictate perceptions of ‘other’ places. Iona Roisin’s exhibition at Hippolyte Studio comprises footage shot while travelling on group excursions across Russia in 2019. The video piece An Uncountable Number of Threads is an attempt to draw out the ethical restrictions of a travelogue, while questioning how (and why) to make one.
At times, An Uncountable Number of Threads captures an awkward tourist-gaze, aware of its outsider position. But as a self-reflexive work that considers its own creation, it ultimately unravels as the artist rationalises themselves out of a particular way of working, inviting the viewer into their uncertainty.
Roisin’s practice spans across mediums but centres around text as a binding element. Through language they return to the same concerns: ways of making, difficulty, intimacy, failure. This often leads to ‘art about art’ or works in which the ethics of making and representing are examined.
The poem These Days by Charles Olson encapsulates something of the artist’s approach: whatever you have to say, leave / the roots on, let them / dangle / And the dirt / Just to make clear / where they come from —the desire to reveal the scaffolding around ideas, to make the process and structures visible in the finished piece. Roisin allows the ‘dirt’ of the words to remain, showing the ‘roots’ as a way to acknowledge the origins of something, as well as the time an idea, or an artist moves through. For them, this is a way of working with openness, seeking questions rather than resolutions.
Iona Roisin (b.1989) is a British artist and poet based in Helsinki. Roisin graduated with a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki in 2018 and earned their Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art from The Cass School of Art and Design in London. Roisin’s video works have been screened at several festivals internationally and in Finland and most recently has exhibited at Wäinö Aaltosen Taidemuseo and Lappeenrannan Taidemuseo. Roisin’s poetry has been published in Tuli&Savu (FI), Propel Magazine (UK) and in Fourteen Poems (UK). They recently won the Guernsey International Poetry Prize, judged by Paul Muldoon. They are a member of the trans publishing collective Almanac Press and are a co-founder of Trans Library Helsinki.
The exhibition and artist’s work has been supported by Koneen Säätiö.
Iona Roisin
An Uncountable Number of Threads
6–29 September 2024
Hippolyte Studio
image: Iona Roisin, An Uncountable Number of Threads, 2024