At Elverket.

O.S.A. R.S.V.P. exhibition at Gallery Elverket invites a variety of audiences to come face to face with art. The O.S.A. R.S.V.P. exhibition is an invitation to an encounter. The title is a double summons to different audiences and an appeal to join in. Behind the project is Pro Artibus Foundation curators Juha-Heikki Tihinen’s and Kia Orama’s interest in finding a connection between devising an exhibition and the audience work.

When planning an exhibition, it is often customary to first choose the artworks and then to think about what kinds of audience-work projects can be carried out, but here that question has already been considered simultaneously with the choices of artists and works. The artists and their interests have been pivotal in the development of the audience-work projects, since the curators have wanted to find a suitable project for each artist. The exhibition’s central hypothesis is to investigate how different audiences can encounter art and the artist in variable ways. Gallery Elverket is at the centre of events, but both the art and the accompanying programme extend outside the walls of the exhibition space.

O.S.A. R.S.V.P. is divided into three stages (summer, autumn and winter), which are reflected in changed hangings, while the various projects are also otherwise observable in the exhibition’s varying appearance. The exhibition uses multi-media to show works by five Finnish and Swedish contemporary artists. The programme includes relevant projects carried out with various audiences, involving showings at Elverket of postboxes, audience artworks, and diverse other works made with the public. Sculptures will be placed outside the gallery. During the first week of the exhibition the yard and the exhibition space will be taken over by our art camp for children; a chance for the children to work in the gallery and make it their own.

Cecilia Cissi Hultman (SE) is interested in how she can play with different exhibition spaces while, at the same time, creating an event in which the viewer sees the space with new eyes. In her characteristic fashion Hultman works with numerous different techniques to perceptualize and shape the exhibition space. In her work Meidän välissä Marika Orenius (FI) deals with the communication that occurs when faced with a work nearing completion or still in the making. She contemplates the importance of the intervening space in artistic encounters. The artist duo Restlessminds (SE) – Linda Emmy Al-Ghussein and Fabian Olavson – continue their exhibition project, which deals with the role of those near to us in life’s various problem situations. Their works are both in Elverket and outside. Joel Slotte’s (FI) paintings often have an autofictive starting point, since he finds points of departure for his works in his own life or that of someone close to him. His works contain ongoing encounters between different realities – when real meets imaginary.