PHOTOGRAPHIC GALLERY HIPPOLYTE

Yrjönkatu 8–10 (courtyard), 00120 Helsinki, Finland, +358 9 612 33 44, www.hippolyte.fi
Open: Tue–Fri 12–17, Sat–Sun 12–16

4.–27.10.2013
OREET ASHERY
Party for Freedom


Original score: Timo-Juhani Kyllönen, Woolf, Morgan Quaintance & Chyskyyrai

Oreet Asherys moving-image work Party for Freedom will be screened at Photographic Gallery Hippolyte accompanied by live music. An eight-piece ensemble, conducted by Timo Juhani Kyllönen (FI), performs together with the queer punk band Woolf (UK).

Thursday 3 October, 6 p.m.
Friday 4 October, 7 p.m.
Saturday 5 October, 6:15 p.m

Admission free. Seats for 50.
Advance reservation required by 4 p.m. on the preceding day: info@hippolyte.fi, +358 9 612 33 44

Party for Freedom, by the London-based visual artist Oreet Ashery, will premier in Finland at Photographic Gallery Hippolyte in October. This also launches the exhibition collaboration of Hippolyte with the Saari Residence (Kone Foundation). The three-screen video installation includes a commissioned soundtrack with original music by the contemporary Finnish composer Timo-Juhani Kyllönen, as well as the London-based feminist queer punk band Woolf and musicians Morgan Quaintance and Chyskyyrai.

The exhibition opens with three live concerts at Hippolyte, 3–5 October  2013. The piece is screened at the gallery, accompanied by Timo-Juhani Kyllönen conducting an eight-piece ensemble, and the four members of Woolf performing. The opening night also includes a performance by the performance artist Owen Parry (UK).

Oreet Ashery calls her piece a moving-image audiovisual album. The work is an interrogation of the visual, cultural and political values associated with Western Freedom, drawing upon histories of experimental performance, theatre and film. Oreet Ashery poignantly and humorously examines populist claims and mediascapes that run Europe with emptied scenes of imagined nationhood and where immigration and Islam are portrayed as an ‘outside-in’ threat to Western values of Freedom. The work also responds to the political assassinations of Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and Theo van Gogh in 2004 in the Netherlands, and the ensuing popularity of Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician and leader of the far-right Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom).

In collaboration with artists across a range of disciplines and developed through a series of workshops, Party for Freedom features an irreverent and animated array of characters and scenarios, while using nakedness, trash aesthetics and collective sound and action to explore performances of liberation. Part of the work is loosely based on one of Mayakovsky’s evocative plays from the 1920’s.

Oreet Ashery, Party for Freedom, videostills

The Saari Residence is maintained by the Kone Foundation and hosts both artists and researchers in Mynämäki, in Southwest Finland. Oreet Ashery stayed at the Saari Recidence during 2012, working on Party for Freedom. Through the residency’s Saari Well concept she formed a friendship with the composer Timo-Juhani Kyllönen, also staying at Saari during that time, resulting in their collaboration. The Saari Well is an opportunity for artists and researchers working at the residence to meet, share, and leave their mark on each other’s thoughts, work and the Saari Residence.

Oreet Ashery is a London-based visual artist, working in performance, still and moving image, objects and writing, mainly in the context of post-identity and minority discourses, and continuously explores the participatory nature of events, situations and public platforms. Ashery is interested in the body and everyday life, presently around performances of western liberation. Ashery explores eccentric performances, actions and speeches of fictional and real public figures in the realms of populist and trashy mediascapes, currently in relation to neo-orientalism and imagined nationhood.

Ashery exhibits, performs, intervenes and screens her work extensively in an international context. Public spaces have included the Liverpool Biennial, Venice Biennial, ZKM, Tate Modern, Brooklyn Museum, Pompidou Centre, Freud Museum and the National Review of Live Art.

 Ashery is an honorary research fellow in the drama department at Queen Mary University London, and a lecturer in the art department in Goldsmiths.

Timo-Juhani Kyllönen is a composer, concert accordionist and conductor. Kyllönen graduated in 1982 taking his Master of Arts degree from the Gnesin Institute in Moscow with diplomas in the accordion, orchestral conducting and pedagogics, thereafter he studied composition at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatoire. In 1986 he was selected as composer of the year by the Helsinki Festival. In the summer of 2013 Kyllönen’s The Seal Op.86 had its world premiere on the main stage at the Savonlinna Opera Festival in Finland.

Timo-Juhani Kyllönen’s production includes operas and orchestral work, chamber and vocal music that has been played around the world. Kyllönen believes that the profounder motives for creating music lie in the will of people to communicate with each other. With his music Kyllönen wants to mediate positive energy, and within it he finds beauty in midst of a surrounding chaos. Party for Freedom Op.87, played at Hippolyte, is a chamber music series in four parts, that saw its birth in collaboration with artist Oreet Ashery.

In collaboration:
 Photographic Gallery Hippolyte, Saari Residence (Kone Foundation)
Thank you: Pro AV Saarikko, Kasino Creative Studio, Artproof

Party for Freedom credits:
Artists & performers: Andro Andrex, Kim Bumstead, Miles Coote, Alex Der Matis, Soren Evinson, Elizabeth B. Harris, Edd Hobbs, Lucy Huston, Tim Owen Jones, Andrew Kerton, Lynn Lu, Alice MacKenzie, Phoebe Osborne, Owen G Parry, Vanda Playford, Irene Revell; Voiceover: Nick Ellsworth; Camera: Oreet Ashery, Anna Matos, Vanda Playford; Editor: Guillem Serrano; Visual FX: Daria Fissoun; Sound Mixing: Alfredo Paz

Supported by: Artangel (commission), Art Council England, Kone Foundation, Performance Matters (a collaboration between Goldsmiths University of London, University of Roehampton, and the Live Art Development Agency, financially assisted by the Arts & Humanities Research Council).

Riso prints: LemonMelon Printing

For more information:
Petronella Grönroos, exhibition co-ordinator, Photographic Gallery Hippolyte, +358 9 612 33 44, petronella.gronroos@hippolyte.fi