22.3.-2.4. Biota of the Misantropocene

Opening / Avajaiset 21.3. 18-21

Opening hours:

Tue - Sun 13-18

I had a terrible dream, a nightmare. I was a bipedal creature with two appandages, I tried to burrow myself under the soil but it felt so wrong. I was suffocating, it felt as if the earth itself was rejecting me. I became hungry at some point and it was as if some foreign instinct had taken hold of me, something I had forgotten was there but had always been somewhere deep in my roots, I cannibalized everything around me until nothing but the hunger remained. I was so alone after that, everything was gone and soon I too disappeared.

Can flora experience trauma? have the plants forgotten us or have we imprinted a permanent epigenetic memory of our previous existence onto them? Has it been so long since humanity's disappearance that they have become nostalgic, forgetting the ills we caused and reveling in the memory of the companionship we offered in the past?

In these paintings we have engaged with the subject of a post human world, we have imagined the new protagonists of this world to be plant life.

Even though in this world the human species is long gone, we are still acutely visible in our absence through the consequences of our actions and the marks that remain as evidence of our wrong doing.

By giving the vegetation an anthropomorphic quality we make it possible to recognize the pain, trauma and destruction we as a species have imparted on our environment, reorienting our current human centric worldview to something that recognizes that we are not separate from our environment and vice versa.

We are in the Anthropocene and it is time for us to come to terms with the fact that there might not be a nature to return to anymore, the all so common idea of our environment as something resilient and static is no longer relevant, this viewpoint serves as a justification for the continuing destruction and as such must be challenged and changed.

Peter Ahlskog (s. 2001), Jesper Vainionpää (s. 2001), Thomas Lavastre (s.1999) and Anton Salmi (s. 2002) all work primarily with painting.