Zone d’éclipse totale

Mika Taanila

The exhibition is on from October 11 to November 10, 2007
The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 5 pm

A special program of Mika Taanila’s films will be presented at the Festival du nouveau cinéma immediately before the opening. The screening will take place, in the presence of the artist, on October 11 at 5:20 pm, at Ex-Centris, 3536 St-Laurent Blvd (514-847-2206).

Eclipse – obscuration of one body in the shadow of another; a moment of decline, a lapse.

For more than fifteen years, Mika Taanila has been concerned with scientific experiments, utopias, and technologies considered revolutionary in the past and outmoded today. Based on these apparent failures, he constructs a rich and complex body of work, which integrates diverse disciplines all the while transcending their conventional limits. Elements from architecture, music, science, philosophy, art and cinema become building blocks for his work and he imposes a new order on them. His art relies upon connections, interactions, collaborations – of sound and image, documentary and experimental cinema, reality and fiction. Thus conceived, Taanila’s work proves to be extraordinarily intricate.

The Zone of Total Eclipse is presented here in its installation version. To create this film, Taanila re-edited the mysterious images derived from the very first attempt to record cinematographically a solar eclipse in July 1945. The looped projection, without an end or a beginning, epitomizes the idea of retrieval of images that Taanila practices. The artist is more interested in the fictional and conceptual aspects of these found images than the mechanical restoration of the conditions of the original experiment. As the artist himself observes, The Zone of Total Eclipse is an homage to the pioneers of scientific cinema, “a celebration of interplanetary shadows at work”.

The second work presented at the gallery, Optical Sound, is based on Symphony #2 For Dot Matrix Printers by Montreal duo [TheUser] and explores the notion of the visual transposition of music. The film and the score are premised on the idea of recuperating an outdated technology, the dot matrix printer, and endowing it with a completely different function, that of a musical instrument.

Film program

Futuro – Tulevaisuuden olotila
Futuro, A New Stance for Tomorrow
1998, 35mm, 29 minutes, in Finnish, Swedish, English, German, Russian and Estonian.
With English subtitles.

This film is an inquiry into yesterday’s house of the future or, in other words, the utopia of plastic architecture. In 1968, the Finnish architect Matti Suuronen designed a plastic house named Futuro, whose elliptic shape and aesthetics resemble those of a flying saucer. In the film, Taanila retraces the story of Futuro, from its purely mathematical conception to its concretization as a cell fit to live, multifunctional and movable. Consisting of recent interviews, fascinating archival documents and excerpts from amateur fi lms, Futuro offers a vivid interpretation of an utopian “space era’’.

Fysikaalinen Rengas - A Physical Ring
2002, 35mm, 4 minutes, no dialogue.

A camera attached to the ceiling, positioned at right angle toward the ground, reveals a composition similar to that of a constructivist kinetic sculpture. The object vibrates to the very limits of the frame, the soundtrack embracing this rhythm. Despite its appearance, A Physical Ring is not based on a science-fiction film, but on scientific footage from the late 1940s documenting an experiment in physics. An unusual experience, whose purpose remains unknown to this day.

Tulevaisuus ei ole entisensä
Future Is Not What It Used To Be
2002, 35 mm, 52 minutes, in Finnish, Swedish and English. With English subtitles.

A portrait, between the poetic documentary and science-fiction genres, of the visionary Finnish artist and researcher Erkki Kurenniemi. Born in 1941, this creative scientist, who has been living in the future for many decades now, has tried his hand at, among other things, music, informatics, robotics, experimental cinema. Taanila’s focus in this film is on Kurenniemi’s obsession with collecting and archiving: his recording of his thoughts, the diligent noting of his observations and the meticulous collection of objects, with the purpose to construct one day an artificial intelligence, a hybrid between a machine and a human being.

Filmmaker, director and artist Mika Taanila was born in 1965 in Helsinki where he lives and works. After completing a degree in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki, he received, in 1992, a diploma from the Department of cinema and television at the Lahti Institute of Design. He has created many documentary films and music videos as well as work specifically conceived for exhibition spaces. His work has been presented, among others, at the Finnish Institute in Paris (France), the Migros museum für Gegenwartskunst (Zurich), the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), at SMAK – Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (Ghent, Belgium), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery (Montreal). He has received numerous prizes and has participated at the Istanbul and Berlin biennales, at Manisfesta 4 as well as a number of other important festivals. Three of his films will be presented at a special screening during the 2007 edition of Festival du nouveau cinéma in Montreal.

The artist would like to thank Kinotar and the Finnish Film Foundation for their support.

This exhibition was made possible with the generous support of the Embassy of Finland and Robert Films Services. Dazibao thanks the artist and Kinotar for their valuable collaboration, its partners: the Festival du nouveau cinéma, SCHEMA Hypercinema Lab, Mel Hoppenheim School of cinema, Concordia University’s MFA program, as well as its members for their support. Dazibao receives financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Conseil des arts de Montréal. Dazibao is a member of the Regroupement des centres d’artistes autogérés du Québec.