• 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), 2023

    4K video, shuffle play, stereo sound

    endless duration, ed. 5 

    € 25 000


    performers:

    Teo Ala-Ruona, Venla Ilona Blom, Paresh Joshi, 
    Etna Ruscica, Jani Ruscica, Pietu Wikström, 
    Nicole Willis, Keiko Yamamoto

    3D animation 
    & compositing:

    Gabriel de La Cruz

     

    sound design 
    & distortion:

    Mikko Pykäri

     

    cinematography:
    Sonja Huttunen

     

    sound recording:
    Arttu Hokkanen

     

    make-up artist:
    Piia Hiltunen

     

    gaffer:
    Anita Ahola

     

    editing:
    Jani Ruscica
    color grading:
    Antti Peltoranta

     

    support from Avek & Taike


  • "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

  • Spotify PLAYLIST

    compiled by Jani Ruscica


  • 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


  • Jani Ruscica, The Inked and their Incandescent Irreverence (13), 2023
  • RECENT SOURCES OF INSPIRATION FOR JANI RUSCICA Lex Morgan Lancaster: Dragging away - Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art, 2022 Taneli... RECENT SOURCES OF INSPIRATION FOR JANI RUSCICA Lex Morgan Lancaster: Dragging away - Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art, 2022 Taneli... RECENT SOURCES OF INSPIRATION FOR JANI RUSCICA Lex Morgan Lancaster: Dragging away - Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art, 2022 Taneli... RECENT SOURCES OF INSPIRATION FOR JANI RUSCICA Lex Morgan Lancaster: Dragging away - Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art, 2022 Taneli... RECENT SOURCES OF INSPIRATION FOR JANI RUSCICA Lex Morgan Lancaster: Dragging away - Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art, 2022 Taneli... RECENT SOURCES OF INSPIRATION FOR JANI RUSCICA Lex Morgan Lancaster: Dragging away - Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art, 2022 Taneli... RECENT SOURCES OF INSPIRATION FOR JANI RUSCICA Lex Morgan Lancaster: Dragging away - Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art, 2022 Taneli...

    RECENT SOURCES OF INSPIRATION FOR JANI RUSCICA

    Lex Morgan Lancaster: Dragging away - Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art, 2022


    Taneli Viljanen: Pimeä kuu, 2023


    Amy Sillman: Faux Pas - Selected Writings and Drawings, 2020


    Phyllida Barlow: Collected Lectures, Writings and Interviews, 2021

    Jo Applin: Lee Lozano - Not Working, 2018


    Fred Moten: All that Beauty, 2019

    Ursula K. Le Guin: - Lao Tzu- Tao Te Ching, 1997


    Jack Halberstam: Wild Things - The Disorder of Desire, 2020


    Mel Y. Chen: Animacies - Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect, 2012


    José Esteban Muñoz: Disidentifications - Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, 1999


    Tsai-Ming Liang: I don't want to sleep alone, 2006 & Stray Dogs, 2013


    Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Cemetery of Splendour, 2015


    Agnes Varda: The Gleaners and I, 2000


    Twyla Tharp: Jelly Roll dance, 1971
  • 'I FOR IRIDESCENCE'

    In 2024, Garret Publishing will release an artist book by Jani Ruscica titled I for Iridescence. The book features dialogues...
    Snail’s ways and milky shells, 2023

    In 2024, Garret Publishing will release an artist book by Jani Ruscica titled I for Iridescence. The book features dialogues the artist has had with other artists, writers, curators and scholars. For Ruscica it creates a platform for a reciprocal reflection of the practices of all its contributors. The book features Jani Ruscica in conversation with Diana Campbell Betancourt, Tomaso Binga, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Angus Carlyle, Lex Morgan Lancaster and Taneli Viljanen. Unedited and unfinished dialogues with scholar/curator Lex Morgan Lancaster and author/sound artist Taneli Viljanen can be read in their present forms through the links below:

     
    "A possible thought: a not-knot is that juncture in writing (one can think of the word game “not- knot” as a phenomena manifest in writing specifically, phonetically inaudible), where the patriarchal ordering and structure of the knot is subverted and opens up to multitudinous forms?What could a not-knot be outside of writing, besides language, in other mediums and spaces? What could its relationship be to the uses of “not”, its potential? “No” unto itself feels broad and spacious, also slightly shapeless (but shapelessness always provides its own intrigue!) (How does “shapelessness” itself operate, in any context or somewhere specific even, but unpredictable?)" – Taneli Viljanen
     
    "Looking to your work, I can see that the slippage of signification is crucial in that it often starts to give us something we think we know, a familiar kind of image or sign, and then stops short of fully cohering or completing (or exceeds beyond something that might cohere or complete). I can even see how your work activates the dragging that I talk about in my book in terms of both the precarity of meaning production and the visual and material drag of a form expanding and flowing out through a space. This refusal of completion seems important...how do you think about your work and process in terms of its relationship to a finished thing and also to ideas of mastery? "  – Lex Morgan Lancaster
    READ THE FULL DIALOGUE WITH LEX MORGAN LANCASTER
  •  

    "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

     

  • JANI RUSCICA
    photo: Sini Pelkki

    JANI RUSCICA

    Looking for common ground between different and seemingly disparate art forms, JANI RUSCICA'S practice explores the mutability of meaning and processes of naming, whilst on one hand questioning notions of fixity and on the other, any sense of stable categories or binaries. Their work attempts to playfully and experientially collapse boundaries of language, matter, animacy and meaning through the use of a variety of mediums; from video to sound and performance and from murals to print works and sculpture. 

     
    Jani Ruscica (b. 1978, Finland/Italy) lives and works in Helsinki. They studied sculpture at the Chelsea College of Art & Design in London and media art at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. Ruscica has held several solo exhibitions, most recently at Kunsthalle Helsinki (2022) and at 1646 Art Space in the Hague (2021), and participated in numerous international exhibitions and screenings, including Kiran Nadar Museum, New Delhi (2023); 6th Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2023); HAM, Helsinki (2023); MMOMA, Moscow (2021); AGWA, Perth (2020) and 1st Riga Biennial (2018).  Ruscica's works are included in collections such as Centre Pompidou in Paris, Saastamoinen Foundation, Espoo and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. In 2018 they were awarded with the William Thuring Main Prize. 

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