SCHOLART: Bye bye Gallery KLEIN

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Bye bye Gallery KLEIN

Gallery KLEIN was a project which started quite at the same time as we started to discuss scholart. I had been running two 'real' galleries in Kallio, the first one, ROR Gallery (with friends like Jiri Geller and Eva Neklyaeva) in the beginning of the 2000s and the second one, Kallio Kunsthalle, in the beginning of the 2010s (with Petri Saarikko and Sasha Huber). KLEIN happened, because I was running a course on galleries (White Cube) together with Pia Euro, and I realized that besides the big wooden gallery which we built as an experiment (before filling it with art), it would be fun to experiment with a really small gallery space. I went out and bought a small suitcase (meant for children).

Above: Elham Rahmati's drawing exhibition. Below: Jean-Francois Paquay's garden art in KLEIN.

This suitcase gallery which traveled with me wherever I gave speeches and lectures, was as real as possible with openings, artist statements and webpages. Most exhibitions are seen by approximately 100 viewers but the interesting thing with KLEIN was that people spent more time watching the art works. I remember from my old days as a ‘real gallerist’ that most visitors to ‘real’ galleries just walk in, turn their head and write their name in the guestbook, and then they go out, heading for the next one. Among many others, KLEIN exhibited Jean-Francois Paquay (Belgium), Elham Rahmati (Iran/Italy), Anna Korotkova (Russia/Finland), Sinem Kayacan (Turkey/Finland) and Melinda Abercrombie (US). Scholartist and urban scholar Taina Rajanti exhibited her series of park photos (parkart). With Taina we finished the gallery with a performance act: we left it in Berlin, in the park close to the angel, together with a message (please adopt this gallery if you feel like it).

I was lucky to be able to announce the existence of the gallery in Art Pulse, and the exhitions traveled to e.g. Riga, Saldus, Bratislava and Warsaw. KLEIN was also one of the official exhibition spaces showing the winners of the Nordic dance film competition 60secondsdance in 2015. Still I am not sure if the philosophical ideas I got from it should be written out or just used in exhibition planning.

See the video here. More about KLEIN (webpages) here.

Max Ryynänen

No comments:

Post a Comment

All 'real' comments are published! Checking comments because of bots and crackpots.

On Scholart

Why think about Sartre's, Camus' and Simone de Beauvoir's literary work as artistic? Leonardo worked hard to develop an accurate way of representing the world by painting and drawing - and called his work scientific. Manifests are quite scholarly and quite artistic, but neither of these words really describes the surrealist or dadaist manifesto.

We thnk we need a new concept, scholart, to stand for the use of artistic methods in scholarly (non art) work.

Diogenes’ performative philosophy was scholartist by nature, and the same could be said of Wittgenstein’s house - or Kristeva's novel The Samurai (without forgetting Kierkegaard). Anthropologists often do scholart when they film as a method in studying their topics (see e.g. the work of Michael Taussig). The concept could be extended to discuss sufism as a religiously laden form of scholartism and yoga as a form of scholartism of the body.

The scholartist manifesto was published February 12, 2014, and it is an invertion of the Sol Lewitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969). The first scholartist exhibition was opened November 14, 2014, in the ARTS House of Aalto University at Otaniemi Espoo (Finland). It presented the work of Taina Rajanti, Max Ryynänen, Farbod Farkharzadeh, Eva Pavlic Seifert, Melinda Abercrombie and Andrea Coyotzi Borja. The first course on Scholart started Sept 26, 2016. This blog will start to present and discuss the history and contemporary forms of scholartism.