Dwelling Building Thinking. Nelimarkka Art Museum, Alajärvi, 2015 (Invited)
The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the essay by philosopher Heidegger, where he discusses the nature of the place and the importance of questioning the reasons for building and living in a certain place.
Andersson exhibits works, which make a stand for more ornamentation and a more fantasy filled architecture. The works suggest a stronger participation of art and artistic thinking in the planning of cities. The main work of the exhibition is the Life on a Leaf video kiosk-installation, which, through three video monitors, show the construction of Andersson’s and his family’s home, the Life on a Leaf house, as well as the life in the total artwork, which also is Andersson’s PhD at the Academy of fine Arts, Helsinki. The walls and the roof of the kiosk are made of left over material from the building process.
As a counterweight to the activity of building, the exhibition also shows works which deal with aggression and demolition. The video The Destruction of Beauty documents the destruction of the ornate facade of an iconic Art Nouveau building in Turku, which also is the scene for the video The Destruction of Memories, which shows the demolition of a popular Children’s playground sculpture.
But the destructive powers are also inside ourselves. The theme of the two big digital drawings/prints is guns and war, actualized because of Andersson’s son Adrian. Already at the age of under two years, he created a gun out of a garlic press and a chopstick. This, as well as the huge pile of war drawings made some years later, inspired Andersson to search for the war drawings he did himself when he was at the same age as Adrian, fifty years earlier.
The result is collaboration between father and son, an epic drawing called War, a fight between the troops of the father and the troops of the son. In the work Sea battle on waves 103–309 Hz, Andersson has let his childhood war-drawings fight against his captain-father’s cargo ships. The fight take place close to three death islands, on a sea with waves, which have the wavelength of human speech.
The Destruction of Beauty
The Destruction of Memories