18 Oct 2011

Lea and Pekka Kantonen receive AVEK award

LEA AND PEKKA KANTONEN HONOURED WITH THE €15,000 AVEK AWARD

The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture, AVEK, has honoured visual artists Lea and Pekka Kantonen with the AVEK Award. The award for media arts worth €15,000 was given in September at the season opening of AVEK in Media Centre Lume. The AVEK Award was presented for the eighth time.

Lea (born 1956) and Pekka Kantonen (born 1955) are pioneers of media art. They have created performance and video art as well as communal art since the early 1980s. The Kantonen couple was a part of the Turppi collective whose joint video piece Earth Contacts (1982) is considered to have sparked the 1980s era of Finnish video art. Since then, the couple has collaborated with a number of artist collectives, schools, museums and various communities both locally and internationally.

To Lea and Pekka Kantonen, receiving the award is a welcome indication that their work is valued. 'We are delighted that our long-lasting experiment to be exposed to and involved with different media is valued as media art alongside art that furthers technological innovation or employs expertly crafted techniques. The main focus of our art is on day-to-day events and how we conduct our lives within the media's sphere of influence.'

The artist couple has produced video pieces of a personal and documentary nature for more than three decades. An impressive display of their skill was seen at the Kunsthalle Helsinki exhibition hall in the spring of 2011 in the form of the Ripples at Home exhibition, which was a collage of pieces comprising installations and video works. The pieces were compiled from footage recorded over a period of 20 years: life at home, friends and day-to-day events. The process-like pieces in the exhibition reflected the Kantonen couple's view of the home as a place for discourse and communality.

Lea and Pekka Kantonen have shaped their home videos into performances, installations, video shows, discussion events and event studies. The continued efforts have given form to a new method the couple has dubbed Generational Filming: the home videos are viewed and commented on together with different age groups, specialists and cultural groups. Video recorded in the viewing situations is then integrated into the original home videos, and the newly-created generations of video are shown to new audiences whose comments are, once again, incorporated into the next edit, i.e. generation.

The justifications for the AVEK award emphasise that although the acknowledgement granted to the Kantonen couple is not a lifetime achievement award, their 30 years of video photography and their 20-year video diary project have an undeniably unique status in the history of Finnish and international video art. The project is truly one of a kind and extraordinary. 'Video is more than a mirror – a mirror image is difficult to show to others and especially archive. For this reason, the Kantonen couple's hopefully long – as the longer it continues the more significance it gains – visual expedition into humanity is, by virtue of its personal nature, important to us and to future generations', the jury's statement describes.

Lea and Pekka Kantonen's other works, too, mostly consist of projects where temporal layers, intercultural discourse and commentary form cycles and generations of cycles. The couple's projects often combine art with field work, education, research or political activity.

The AVEK jury was formed by chairman Special Designer Perttu Rastas, and members Curator Kati Kivinen, Artistic Director Laura Köönikkä and AVEK's Production Consultant for media art productions Heidi Tikka. The AVEK Board of Directors chose the award winner based on the jury's statement.

PREVIOUS AVEK AWARD RECIPIENTS 2004-2010

Media artist Heidi Tikka (8 September 2004)
Media artist Hanna Haaslahti (6 September 2005)
Media artist Pekka Sassi (7 September 2006)
Artist Adel Abidin (6 September 2007)
Artist Pia Lindman (11 September 2008)
Artist-curator Juha Huuskonen (10 September 2009)
Visual artist Jani Ruscica (9 September 2010)

AVEK media art award 2011 / Jury's statement

Soon we can celebrate the 50th anniversary of video and media art. Naturally, an exact date for the event is impossible to determine, but the first moments when media was consciously introduced to the context of galleries and museums can be dated back to the early 1960s. Some may argue that the history of video art began in the mid-1960s as that was the time when portable video recording devices became available to artists.

But what does media art as a concept mean today? Our friend, UCLA professor Erkki Huhtamo, reflected upon the definition and boundaries of media art in his 2010 Ars Electronica festival report with the following words:

'Media art has become so much of an everyday concept that very few find themselves contemplating its problematic nature. The meaning of the concept is by no means clear cut. Insofar as the term is used to refer to art created with new electronic or digital devices, the entire concept may as well be scrapped. Video is now a more common instrument for art creation than a paintbrush. There is no point in describing Eija-Liisa Ahtila's video installation as media art: what it is, is modern art, pure and simple.' (Erkki Huhtamo, Taide ja design 10/2010)

In a way, media art has always suffered from the broadness of the concept. The best way to define it has always been to describe it in relation to other arts and technology-dependent media production methods, such as film and television. However, media art has always been characterised by small production groups, works created by single artists, and the continuous implementation of new and unique methods. The use of a video camera in day-to-day life in the 1970s was a new concept. Yet now it has become a commonplace means of social communication and one of the essential visual representations of our Western way of life. The video camera has added a global, nearly real time dimension to our vision.

What does all of this have to do with the AVEK Media Art Award being presented?

There is no doubt that the recipients of the award deserve acknowledgement as pioneers in the field. After all, they began creating video pieces in the early 1980s. In Finland, the decade was a time of emergence for new art forms such as video, environmental and performance art. Environmental and performance art came together in the Turppi collective's joint video piece from 1982, Earth Contacts. This ritualistic performance work, which was created at a gravel pit in connection to a Nordic environmental event, is considered to have sparked the 1980s era of Finnish video art. The Turppi collective was formed by Marikki Hakola, Pekka Kantonen, Lea Kantonen and Jarmo Vellonen. A later addition to the group was Martti Kukkonen.

The 2011 AVEK Media Art Award goes to Lea and Pekka Kantonen who have continued to produce video pieces of a personal and documentary nature for more than three decades. An impressive display of their skill was seen at the Kunsthalle Helsinki exhibition hall in the spring of 2011 in the form of the Ripples at Home exhibition, which was a work forged together from material shot over more than 20 years. The couple's vision has been to record footage to create a personal video diary by regularly filming their home, friends and day-to-day experiences.

And the process continues. In 2009, Pekka Kantonen wrote in the AVEK-magazine that the total length of recorded video had reached 1,100 hours. 'My dream is to never stop filming.'

To define the work of the Kantonen couple as mere diary-esque documentation of day-to-day life would be a disservice. Pekka Kantonen is currently exploring the documentary dimension of his own life in a doctoral thesis, which is based on his concept of Generational Filming. It involves viewing and commenting on home videos together with different age groups, specialists and cultural groups. The concept derives from the Shared Anthropology method created by the French ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch, where the creator is no longer a detached observer but a part of a group engaged in discussion. Similarly, as the Kantonen's refuse the narrative aspect of documentaries by presenting the day-to-day events primarily in an unedited form, they see their work as more than creating a documentary of their own life: the footage could be described as photographs in motion. By presenting this material in the context of art and in other social situations, which are also filmed, another social layer is added, which manages to sidestep the normal context of documentary filming.

Although the AVEK Media Art Award presented to the Kantonen couple is not a lifetime achievement award, their 30 years of video photography and their 20-year video diary project have an undeniably unique status in the history of Finnish and international video art. The project and process are truly one of a kind and extraordinary.

Video is more than a mirror. A mirror image is difficult to show to others and especially archive. For this reason, the Kantonen couple's hopefully long – as longer it continues the more significance it gains – visual expedition into humanity is, by virtue of its personal nature, important to us and to future generations.

Olavi Paavolainen listed the following aphorism by philosopher Hermann Keyserling as the motto of his book Lähtö ja loitsu (The Departure and Spell, 1937): 'The shortest path to oneself leads around the world.' It is our hope that those who take this journey will often carry a video camera.

Perttu Rastas
Chairman of the jury
Kati Kivinen
Laura Köönikkä
Heidi Tikka

The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture (AVEK), which operates in connection with the Finnish copyright organisation Kopiosto, uses its share of copyright remuneration to promote audiovisual culture. The majority of the funds originate from private copying levy, e.g. from blank video cassettes and blank DVDs. AVEK funds the cultural exportation and development of different kinds of film genres, advanced training and further education of the people and organisations in the audiovisual industry, in addition to festivals and events. AVEK also funds the production of short films and documentaries, animations, and media art. AVEK funds the development of cultural content production through the Ministry of Education and Culture's DigiDemo grant.

For further information, please contact:
Juha Samola, General Secretary of AVEK, +358 9 4315 2351

Lea and Pekka Kantonen, +358 40 562 0751, pekka.kantonen@kuva.fi, lea.kantonen@kuva.fi, www.kantonenart.com

Press photos at:
www.pyrstotahti.com/kantoset/
Upon use of the images, please list the piece in question (Lea and Pekka Kantonen: Ripples at Home, Kunsthalle Helsinki) and the information of the photographer (photos by Sakari Viika).