黑料不打烊

RADIUS is pleased to present the solo exhibition INDIVIDUALITY, IDENTITY, AND RELATED METAPHYSICAL IDEAS by artist Alma Heikkil盲, who lives and works in Helsinki. Alma Heikkil盲鈥檚 works are often attempts to represent things that cannot be experienced by the human body and its senses. These include microbial life forms too small to be consciously encountered in everyday life; forest ecosystems where important processes occur underground and within plants; and many large-scale phenomena that occur at speeds and dimensions beyond our comprehension. She is a founding member of Mustarinda, a multidisciplinary collective based in the ancient forests of Northern Finland that organises residencies at the intersection of art and ecology.

For her solo exhibition at RADIUS, Heikkil盲 will present new work that explores the entanglement of the human body with the environment. The emphasis will be of humans and the often unnoticed importance of microbial life forms that make human life possible鈥攖hink, for example, of bacteria in the intestinal flora, or phytoplankton in the production of oxygen. Mixing ideas around philosophy of biology, biological individuality, metaphysics, and personal identity, the works in the exhibition confuse and challenge the understanding in both the oneness and sameness of who we are.

For Heikkil盲, art is a domain for multispecies collaboration and communality. By connecting with an array of different modes of being, ranging from bacteria, fungal spores, and other agencies that conjointly are and shape the fundamental building blocks of life on Earth, her role as an artist seems modest: extending an invitation to gather and connect. However, this invitation is not necessarily meant as to solely have an experience of something or to make an appointment with thought鈥攁s an individuated and intellectual exercise, joining with our preconceived knowledges and epistemological maps in hand鈥攂ut an invitation that equally serves to make our feedback loops come full circle: the embrainment of the body and the embodiment of the brain, whilst embedded in the shared living environment, here solidified in the shape of an exhibition. This invitation is thus formulated and extended in diametrical opposition to the conventional anthropocentric, western, and modernist notion of art as a cultural field of inter-human energy-exchange, where intentionalities are unveiled in the shape of objects, and receptions and understandings govern through apprehending and grappling human subjects. 

In line with the previous, art and life coincide in Heikkil盲鈥檚 artistic practice, quite literally, as her work is both indebted to and engrained with the different other-than-human-agencies that co-author the work鈥攊ncluding microorganisms she carries within her own body, among bacteria indispensable to human health and wellbeing. Heikkil盲 literally works with the materials; they are not merely resources, but co-agencies. From this symbiotic and reciprocal understanding, the large-scale painting works presented at RADIUS thus bypass a mere representational field and painterly pictorial regime, to their recovery in the key of being and becoming sites of multifarious ontological grounding, in the plural. In other words still, painting is not a metaphor, image or mirror, but a multispecies site of becoming-with, of worlding-possibility.