City to City: Periphery

Jakub Pišek (SK) , Anni Kinnunen (FI)

Alfa Gallery, Kasarne Kulturpark, Košice 2024

The project’s goal is to encourage artists to work collaboratively online and contribute to the emergence of new digital art. Selected participants work for a few months in pairs or in a team – City to City – on a digital artwork that responds to the current topic.

A/V installation "Parsifal" is a collaborative artwork between cities Košice and Oulu.

Anni Kinnunen's videos are calm and contemplative.

Their principle is hidden in a change in the perspective on time, which flows as if in disagreement with reality, with our culture of flashing, with the phenomenon of rapid editing, a continuous flow of information. Seemingly simple or minimalistic means at first glance arouse in us the challenge to examine what we are looking at. After a while, we discover that we are not observing the content of the video, but rather observing ourselves. An external impulse turns us inward, we are confronted with a new sensitivity and fleeting peace hidden in reserved colors and moderate to mysterious shapes.

This "intimate" material opens up to a new interpretive plane in the hands of Jakub Pišek. Time, which has so far flowed linearly, is decomposed into a surface. Concentration on a point in the center of the screen dissolves into endlessly running strips. We see a closed world in its past, present and future. Everything is accessible at one moment and in one place.

In this way, Jakub not only figuratively but pragmatically approaches Wagner's fascination with metaphysics, which he exploited in the libretto for the opera "Parsifal" where space and time "Raum und Zeit" are mystically united. In Jakub's progressive and very contemporary interpretation, we find time in the dynamic surface of a large-scale projection.