Stoa’s gallery exhibitions asks: “How can art contribute to a collective conscious against war?”

With Harun Farocki, Nisrine Bouhkari, Oleksiy Radynksi, Red Forest, and Subversive Film.
Curated by Giovanna Esposito Yussif / Museum of Impossible Forms

This exhibition takes its name from the Zapatista Commission’ statement released on March 2nd titled THERE WILL BE NO LANDSCAPE AFTER THE BATTLE (On the invasion of the Russian army into Ukraine) – and it is a humble return to this urgent call.

This exhibition concentrates on the question of movement, images in movement, and the mobilisation that images trigger. Learning from Farocki’s work, it aims to raise questions such as: How can art contribute to a collective anti-war consciousness? How can artistic processes become a meticulous effort to transform reality and a part of collective action for systemic change?, What resources do we need in moments of struggle and transformation in the quest for justice?, and How can collective sensibility become a link between battles in the defense of life?

Two film screenings are held in Stoa’s music hall as part of the exhibition presenting the cinematic work of the exhibition’s featured artists:
Tue 31 May at 18:00-19:30: Oleksiy Radynski
Sat 4 June at 12:00-17:30: Harun Farocki

About the artists:

Harun Farocki (1944 – 2014) was born in Novy Jicin (Czech Republic, annexed to Germany at the time). Farocki wrote essays, film and television scripts. His work was exhibited at Documenta 12 in Kassel and in many international retrospectives.

Farocki dedicated an extense part of his work to analyse war and the ideology encrypted into the images it produces. For this exhibition, we dedicate a one-day screening to engage, learn and reflect through a selection of works spanning from 1969 to 2010.

Nisrine Boukhari is a conceptual artist living in Vienna and Stockholm. In her art-based research projects, she uses language to evoke the mind’s distinctive energy in discovering new terrain of the imagination implicating the body and the mind in an immersive poetic and conceptual experience by using conceptual writing, fragmentation, and deconstructed narrative.

Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker and writer based in Kyiv. His films have been screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Docudays IFF, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), and S A V V Y Contemporary (Berlin), among others, and have received a number of festival awards.

Red Forest is a constellation that grounds together research, art, political imagination, and social actions thriving for transformative justice and ecological reparations. In 2021 they initiated pan-continental research focusing on the intersections between contemporary extractivism and datification processes. Red Forest assembles and organises their work with infrastructures of collective reciprocity and interdependency as actual potentiality. Their research contributes to the theoretical framework of Energetic Materialism to conceptualise urgent cultural and social processes in the defense of life and the construction of pluriversal futures in dignified flux.

Museum of Impossible Forms is a cultural centre located in Kontula, East Helsinki, and the coming together of communities of art and cultural workers who believe in the need for building anticolonial, antipatriarchal and non-fascist commitments and futures. It evolves as a heterogeneous platform to engage with experimental, marginal, and migrant forms of expression; and as a laboratory for experiences, critical thought, and radical imagination.