18.1.—24.3.2024

Kunsthalle Kohta inaugurates 2024 with two separate solo exhibitions that were conceived and planned independently but will hopefully not come across as strangers to each other. The exhibiting artists Miriam Bäckström (Sweden, 1967, lives in Stockholm) and Timo Tuhkanen(Finland, 1983, lives in Helsinki) share a similar attitude to the limitations imposed on their chosen techniques – tapestry and ceramics respectively – by the industrial looms and kilns they require. Both need their material and their production facilities to answer with the greatest possible precision and suppleness to the needs dictated by visions for circular woven images or flexible ceramic spirals.

‘Timo Tuhkanen: Speculative Sound’ is an installation in the smaller studio space, comprising experimental ceramics and sound. Tuhkanen, who holds a doctorate from the School of Music, Leeds University, is best known as a composer and sound artist and a researcher in these fields, notably running the project Microtonal Music Studios in Helsinki with support from the Kone Foundation. As a researcher he is also affiliated with the Department of Musicology at the University of Turku and with the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In addition he co-directs, with his partner and fellow artist Egle Oddo, the independent exhibition space Myymälä 2 in the centre of Helsinki.

In his exhibition, Tuhkanen is showing elements from two ongoing series. In the Shadow of the Spiral (2023) started as an exploration of ceramics as a possible material for musical instruments during a longer residency at the European Ceramic Workcentre in Tilburg, the Netherlands.

It developed into an intense period of learning-by-doing that yielded 68 ceramic spirals of different length, designed to amplify sound waves when connected to transducers and proving to be surprisingly supple and resilient.

‘I really knew what I needed to do, and that was to make these many spirals of different sizes and create this forest. I imagined it as a moving forest, a composition of spirals and sound that you could enter and really walk through, and these spirals would shake a bit, like some kind of weird freaky space tree.’

Two of the largest spirals, 250 centimetres tall, are installed standing on the floor of the Kohta studio. In the production process Tuhkanen became fascinated with the pursuit of ‘flexible ceramics’. It may sound like an oxymoron but is a specialised field of materials research that involves infusing regular clay with nano-particles obtained from clay fired at temperatures two or three times higher the customary 1000 centigrades.

To him the enhanced flexibility is mostly of interest because it would prevent the spirals from snapping and breaking under distress and make them more suitable for conducting sound.

The History of Music in Clay (2023) consists of nine 3D printed ceramic discs, in the two distinct and recognisable formats of vinyl LP and EP records. These are displayed on horizontal shelves along the walls of the studio.

Through the built-in wall speakers a soundtrack is playing, a composition made from the sound the groves in these discs emit when they are played on a turntable. It turns out to be a rather gentle variant of ‘white noise’, curiously reminiscent of rain falling on an a asphalt shingle roof.

Timo Tuhkanen’s exhibition is supported by Classic Audio in Helsinki and EKWC in Tilburg. He is the recipient of grants from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland and the Kone Foundation.