2156
2-channel video installation; 24:20min
film by Saana Wang, Text by Harri Laakso, Music by Töölölab
2156 has been exhibited at Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France, Institut Français de Finlande, Gallery Hippolyte, and as part of the Related Realities exhibition at Backlight 2020, where it received the Majaoja Prize.
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Saana Wang’s exhibition 2156 is a compendium of space, time, and coincidence. The multichannel video and sound installation raise questions of visibility and invisibility; Wang invites the audience to examine representational imagery, and to possibly find new clues hidden within the limits of perception and experience. In Wang’s exhibition, the unpredictability of life takes on a visual and atmospheric form.
The exhibition traces a journey from the limits of human physicality, moving beyond the post-industrial condition and the remnants of coal mining, toward an abstract red space shaped by light and shadow.
Wang’s immersive ensemble invites us to be absorbed by the flow of images and to be entranced listening to a flood of sentences—a hypnotic gesture emphasised by a repetition of single events which blur our sense of time. Raised by the fragmented dialogue between a man and a woman, substantive questions about our existence and the coincidental nature of life itself, are intertwined within the fog.
On an autumn day 3rd of October 1925, the torpedo boat S2 sank in the Gulf of Bothnia, and the whole crew lost their lives. My grandfather was supposed to be in that boat, but after a long night’s celebration had ended up in jail. Would I exist, if my grandfather had drowned with the S2 torpedo boat?
On view in the gallery is a corresponding text to 2156 by Professor Harri Laakso—in dialogue with Wang’s artwork and inspired by the thinking of Michel Serres, Walter Benjamin, and especially Alain Badiou’s thoughts on love. Wang’s book 2156 was published in 2017 by Neuflize OBC, Centre Photographique d’lle-de-France.
The Arts Promotion Centre Finland has kindly supported the exhibition at Gallery Hippolyte. The Finnish Cultural Foundation, Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France, and AVEK have supported the production of the work 2156.
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