Varisparvi
Kristiina Koskentola
2.2.-26.2.2023
Avajaiset/Vernissage 2.2.2023 18:00-20:00

Murder of Crows revolves around a video film that developed from a reciprocal ritual of gift exchange between the artist and a group crows.

The appearance of crows is often seen as an omen of death because they are scavengers and are generally associated with decay, animal carcasses, and cemeteries. They are thought to circle above sites where death is expected to take place soon. (Hence the English expression a murder of crows). The crow is associated with putrefaction in alchemical processes. However, crows also have an important role in many religions, mythologies, traditions, and folklore. Crows are thought to be oracles and carriers of divine messages and information. They are often associated with worship of ancestors because they are believed to embody the souls of the recently deceased. In shamanic practices, crow is a valued and powerful spirit guide and embodies its role by shapeshifting.

In Koskentola’s experience, these birds are caring and social creatures and embody certain mythical and magical qualities attributed to them by many cultures and belief systems.

In the exhibition, the natural world, science, alchemy, and the otherworldly entangle in film, objects, and collage works and generate meditative constellation that reflects various processes and bodies in fluid multispecies alliances.

Kristiina Koskentola is a visual artist, PhD. While based in Amsterdam she has wintered in China for over a decade. Koskentola’s recent work explores modes of knowledge production, polyvocal subjectivity and the agency of multiple co-actors (human and beyond), often through intersecting “peripheral”, material and spiritual ecologies, and socio- and ecopolitics. Engaged in diverse collaborations and co-creation processes, she seeks to mediate, speculate, and imagine dialogic and more-than-human futures, among the complexities of entanglements, fragilities, and inequalities unfolding between immediate and systemic global, material and cosmic processes.

Koskentola’s project has been supported by Kone Foundation and Mondriaan Foundation