Michal Czinege: Garden of Death. A site-specific installation, and a part of the Lux Helsinki light festival.

8 – 26 January 2025
MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre
Cable Factory, Tallberginkatu 1 C, Helsinki

Open
8 – 12 January: 17:00-22:00
14 – 26 January: Tue-Fri 12:00-17:00, Sat-Sun 12:00-16:00

Michal Czinege’s Garden of Death is a site-specific installation. It includes painting with birch tree ash, earth pigment and cellulose on canvas, programmed LED light and sound elements.

The exhibition is a part of the Lux Helsinki light festival.

Czinege’s installation Garden of Death is painted with ash from dead trees that heated a house over one winter. The site-specific installation borrows visual elements from herbaria of extinct and endangered plants in the Finnish region of North Karelia.

Referring to Hugo Simberg’s 19th century painting of the same name, the garden of death is an otherworldly place. It is a strange space where something of the skeletal plants’ fragile presence remains flickering as inexplicable traces in time until they, too, cease to exist. The flashes are perhaps an after-pulse, or a memory of a lost existence. Despite the powerful charge, they are now but unembodied bursts, variations in light’s wavelength and perceptual ephemera in the viewer’s mind.

Garden of Death was initially created for the exhibition space at Nitra Gallery in Slovakia, as part of the group exhibition “Forest Line.” The capability to modify dimensions and architectural design of this installation allows the exhibition space to significantly influence the visual and emotional aspects of the individual exhibition. The Garden of Death was first presented to the Finnish audience at the Mänttä Art Festival during the summer of 2024.

At MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre, guests will have for the first time the opportunity to experience Garden of Death accompanied by a multichannel soundscape constructed and remixed from recordings that capture the cracking sounds of dying plants. The ultrasonic sounds were originally detected and recorded by researchers  in a recent study (credit: Khait et al. -2023) of plants responding to stressors such as dehydration. While the frequency of these sounds is too high for human ears, insects and other mammals can likely detect them.

Michal Czinege’s multidisciplinary practice explores interrelationships between human perception, light and colour. In his spatial installations canvases and architectonic structures turn into perceptual processes that take place in time and in the viewer’s presence.

Michal Czinege earned his Doctor of Arts degree from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. He worked as assistant professor at the painting department in the academy until moving to Finland in 2015. Czinege’s works can be found in several European collections, such as Albertina Museum, Vienna, Kunsthalle Praha and the Slovak National Gallery.

michalczinege.com

The creation of this installation was supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike).

PROGRAM:

Helsinki Art Walk tour – Sunday 19 January 2025 at 13:30. Artist Michal Czinege present at the exhibition. Guide for the English language exhibition tour will be Jane Hughes.