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Not-knot, Jani Ruscica’s fourth solo show at Galerie Anhava, strives to break away from rigid frameworks of binary thinking to discover new junctures, connections and polyphonic forms of being.
In the murals stretching along the gallery walls, works printed on rice paper, a video installation and confetti scattered across the floor, refusal appears as potential: one “no” opens the door to many “yeses”. Not-knot is a living situation, a node where old knots and conventions of naming come undone and dissolve only to form new, intricate bonds.
PRESS RELEASE -
POLYNOTKNOT (AND THEY BLOOM), 20234K video, shuffle play, stereo sound
endless duration, ed. 5
performers:Teo Ala-Ruona, Venla Ilona Blom, Paresh Joshi,
Etna Ruscica, Jani Ruscica, Pietu Wikström,
Nicole Willis, Keiko Yamamoto3D animation
& compositing:
Gabriel de La Cruzsound design
& distortion:
Mikko Pykäricinematography:
Sonja Huttunensound recording:
Arttu Hokkanenmake-up artist:
Piia Hiltunengaffer:
Anita Aholaediting:
Jani Ruscicacolor grading:
Antti Peltorantasupport from Avek & Taike
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"My own art making and thinking is very much guided by principles of malleability; that
perceive meaning as something very tangible, tactile, material even and yet as something
endlessly slippery, precarious and volatile.Therefore these actions; of twisting, stretching, dragging, folding, multiplying, cutting, enveloping do indeed become methodological. They function as methods to destabilize the familiar, drag legibility or even intelligibility into crisis, and usher meaning into a free fall, where it exists in a perpetual state of unfixity.Not only do these actions hold deeply political implications for me, they also enable the work to
exist in a space where it can hold on to something very precious, akin to an infinite potentiality, a
continuous state of becoming."
– Jani Ruscica, from the dialogue with Lex Morgan Lancaster -
A series of site-specific murals titled The Inked and their Incandescent Irreverence stretch, circle and bend across the walls of the gallery space.
Their organic, living surface reminds of the night sky speckeld with stars, a tattoo on the skin of a building, or an ancient cave painting.They are fluid marks, slippery in relation to any settled meaning, contorting and changing accordig to the viewers physical movements and vantage points. -
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'I FOR IRIDESCENCE'
Snail’s ways and milky shells, 2023 -
"I'd like to think the work is what it is,
nothing more, no claims on what it does,
certainly no claims on what it is about."
– Jani Ruscica
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photo: Sini Pelkki
