Out of the Box

The summer exhibition Out of the Box, which will be opened at Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art on 12 June 2015, presents more than twenty prominent Finnish artists and their most recent works. The exhibition will be produced by the Cooperative Forum Box and Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art and curated by Juha-Heikki Tihinen.

Art needs a space of its own, to enable the viewer to experience it to the full. The Forum Box is an artists’ cooperative established in 1996 on the initiave of Art Academic and sculptor Kain Tapper (1930–2004). The cooperative has an exhibition space, the Forum Box in Helsinki, which is open to all art. The purpose of Tapper was to create a space where the focus is on artistic quality, and not on commercialism, for example.

Today the cooperative has over 90 members, the majority of which are visual artists. The exhibition Out of the Box will present more than 20 of the cooperative’s artists and their versatile artistic skills. The participating artists represent a solid and impressive artistic talent. The membership of the cooperative could be described as the polyphony and unpredictability of Finnish visual art in a nutshell. As part of the exhibition, works by one of the most renowned Finnish sculptors, academic Kain Tapper, from the collections of Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art will be on display.

The exhibition aims to capture the spirit of Forum Box, to feature the power and originality of the initiative. The artists in the cooperative are very dissimilar; they do not have any style, technique or ism in common that would describe them all. What they do share, though, is their belief in the possibility of unfettered art. The idea of Tapper was to create a space for it, a place where the focus is on high quality, not on form or any other feature of art. In this way art can help people understand their own world and its essence and also open up new perspectives and horizons.

The current members of the cooperative cannot easily be grouped into specific categories but, classified in accordance with the various media in which they work, they include sculptors, painters, graphic artists, photographers as well as those working on installations and videos. The choices of artists have been guided by the desire to convey the versatility and wide scope of Forum Box as well as to emphasise the presence of different generations of artists. Another aim was to invite to the unique space at Kuntsi Museum artists, who feel as much home in Vaasa as in their homebase exhibition space in Ruoholahti, Helsinki. The Forum Box is a high, unrefined  and unsophisticated exhibition space, where art has a space of its own and sufficient room to be itself, in all its glory.

The exhibition to be built at Kuntsi will consist in part of works that have been on display in the Forum Box and in part of entirely new ones. Each artistic ensemble is, however, designed specifically for Kuntsi Museum, respecting its architecture and location. The order of display allows both first-comers and regular visitors to the museum to experience the appearance of art in the space. Our purpose is also to show how art reinvents the space around it and changes our relation to our immediate environment. Art is a mirror, which does not reflect what we want, but which has a power to change everything into its mirror image, that is, into another reality.

The works on display convey the Forum Box’s strong spirit of community, which is about collegiality, regardless of age or any other variable. This, for its part, reflects the undisciplined and fascinating nature of living art. Each artist was advised to be themselves and to represent the Forum Box as a community of individuals where art comes first. The institution, which will soon celebrate its 20th anniversary, has turned out to be dynamic and capable of renewal. The reason for its existence is art, which is what keeps it vibrant and constantly versatile.

The artists participating in the exhibition are Stefan Bremer, Carolus Enckell, Petri Eskelinen, Susanne Gottberg, Radoslaw Gryta, Outi Heiskanen, Emma Helle, Eemil Karila, Pekka Kauhanen, Tapani Kokko, Markus Konttinen, Arto Korhonen, Jukka Korkeila, Markus Kåhre, Johanna Lecklin, Antti Oikarinen, Tarja Pitkänen-Walter, Jorma Puranen, Janne Räisänen, Antti Tanttu, Marianna Uutinen, Marko Vuokola and Kain Tapper.

The curator of Out of the Box, Juha-Heikki Tihinen, will present the exbition in a curator’s tour to be organised in September. In July, in connection with the exhibition, there will be guided tours for children between the ages 4 to 10 where they will be able to get to know the museum building – a former customs warehouse – and to see contemporary art. Guided tours that are open to the public will be organised on Thursdays and Sundays from 14 June onward. In July (8 to 9 July and 15 to 16 July), visitors will be able to become acquainted with local art collectors in Vaasa in a walking tour around the living quarters of the collectors. These programmes are included in the price of admission. On the Night of the Arts, 6 August, admission to Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art and to the exhibition Out of the Box will be free.