IHME 2011 Contemporary Art Festival

The IHME Contemporary Art Festival´s IHME Project 2011 is a film and sculpture by the Danish artist group Superflex entitled Modern Times Forever (Stora Enso Building, Helsinki). This film will be shown in Helsinki´s Market Square 23.3-2.4.2011. The IHME Days will be 1-3.4.2011 at the Old Student House in Helsinki. The programme includes workshops, lectures, discussions and films, plus Saturday night´s IHME Club. Superflex will also be there to discuss the IHME Project. Entrance to all IHME Contemporary Art Festival events is free.

Superflex´ project, commissioned and made for the IHME Contemporary Art Festival, is a film of the Stora Enso Building (design by Alvar Aalto, 1962). The film will be shown on a 40m2 LED screen in the Market Square, with the original building and the building in the film visible simultaneously. The film´s duration and display time is ten days, i.e. it is 240 hours long and it can be viewed 24 hours a day.

The IHME Project will be present in the middle of city´s everyday life, gradually changing over the ten days, while time in it races ahead at an estimated several-hundred-year gallop each day. The film is a fiction about what might happen to the Stora Enso building, as an architectural and ideological symbol, during the coming thousands of years, if the days of humankind end, and only time and weather affect the building. Via the decaying image of Stora Enso´s headquarters, the work raises issues of climate change, urban planning, Finland´s industrial history, and changes in economic structures.

Superflex´ IHME Edition Free Shop has been surprising city dwellers since the autumn by momentarily transforming shops in the capital region into the Free Shop - a shop where anything the customer wants to purchase is free.

IHME Days 2011 - Time, The City, The Future

IHME Days at the Old Student House will present points of view on Superflex´ IHME Project. Superflex will discuss with Claire Doherty, director of Situations, Bristol. More view points will be offered by Professor Emerita Riitta Nikula and architects Mikael Sundman and Mikko Mälkki.

Sunday´s highlight will be a discussion that deals with the question How do we talk about art (in English), with guests: Daniel Birnbaum, Director of the Moderna Museet; Jennifer Allen, critic from Frieze art magazine; Silja Rantanen, visual artist and Professor at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and Anita Seppä, Adjunct professor at the University of Helsinki.

IHME Days start on Friday April 1st with Gordon Matta-Clark´s film Conical Intersect. Professor Bruce Jenkins from School of the Art Institute of Chicago will give a talk on this film and its relationship to contemporary art. More films will be screened during the days and three films by artists Jani Ruscica (SF), Cyprien Gaillard (F) and Jeremy Deller and Nicholas Abrahams (UK) will have their Finnish premiere. Sunday´s programme begins with Yoko Ono´s Film No. 5 (Smile), in which John Lennon´s face gradually awakens into a smile.

www.ihme2011.fi

IHME 2011 Contemporary Art Festival
& IHME Days: 01.04.11 - 03.04.11

Superflex , IHME Project 2011