Group Exhibition
Landscapes of the Future: Guest Curator: Beaconsfield, London

30.11. - 21.12.2018

Helsinki Contemporary's Guest Curator programme continues in December, with an exhibition combining Finnish and English artists, who are in dialogue with Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall, London. The curators are David Crawforth and Naomi Siderfin. The project is supported by Saastamoinen Foundation and the Finnish Institute in London.

The exhibition Landscapes of the Future refers to the range of physical and metaphorical landscapes that open up in a globalized, knowledge economy and brings together some of the artists currently depicting the new lie of the land.

The concept of ‘landscape’ is one of culturally appropriated territory – the found environment or ‘nature’ territorialized. Landscapes combine the geological features of a particular place – country or continent - with the trace of the humans that live in that place, helping to define the identity of peoples as much as they define, and have defined, the land. In the contemporary moment, an addictive dependency on natural resources is key to a post-industrial lifestyle and generates in-balances; of geology, economy and political power. It is also the moment in which accelerated climate change, triggered by human excess, is shifting our relationship with the seasons, with the land and the way we consume it. Vast numbers of people flee the land of their birth to find refuge in unfamiliar landscapes. There are few places where these shifts are more apparent than in London, where most of these artists work.

In art, the landscape tradition is not only one of claiming nature through its depiction, but of imaginary future landscapes. Beaconsfield brings together a group of British artists who touch on the theme in diverse ways, contextualised by one Finnish artist who is passionately engaged with narratives relating to her homeland.

The curatorial frame of this exhibition expands the concept of landscape to shed light upon the changing ways in which we relate to particular spaces, places and the ongoing trace of humanity. The exhibition suggests a role for artists in supporting a sustainable future, through reflection and a disciplined application of the imagination.

The invited artists are:

David Burrows

Anna Bunting-Branch

Keith Piper

BAW (aka David Crawforth and Naomi Siderfin) in collaboration with Bruce Gilbert.

Outi Pieski

Onya McCausland 

Ioana Marinescu

Thomas Yeomans

Philip Thompson


BAW, aka Beaconsfield Artworks is a platform for the collaborative personal work of the artist-researchers David Crawforth (b. 1965) and Naomi Siderfin (b. 1962), founding directors of the artist-led organisation Beaconsfield and curators of Landscapes of the Future. BAW has been active for over 20 years with international presentations of provocative artworks. In Helsinki Contemporary, the duo will display Famine Pass, an audio-visual work created in collaboration with the artist-musician Bruce Gilbert (b. 1946), one of the founding members of the influential and experimental art-punk band Wire.

Anna Bunting-Branch (b. 1987) works across the boundaries of sculpture, painting and animation to re-vision normative territories. She uses fan fiction as a model for communication and the reinvigoration of feminist histories. An animation entitled The Linguists will be seen at Helsinki Contemporary. The work takes Suzette Haden Elgin’s science fiction trilogy Native Tongue (1984-1994) as its starting point and re-opens the possibilities of envisioning a new language for the future.

David Burrows (b. 1965) is a visual artist and writer working across an array of mediums such as painting, video and installation. His works often describe disorientated landscapes occasionally interweaved with elements of familiarity. For Helsinki Contemporary, Burrows creates #Even t Horizon a new floor sculpture based on diagrams and models of black hole singularities found in popular science books; an imaginary and impossible perspective of a lawless zone that no one has even seen.

Ioana Marinescu (b. 1979) is an artist working with photography. Trained as an architect in Bucharest and London, Marinescu works with large-scale photographs in public spaces, with projections and live readings. Her current research examines the relationship between place and memory, using her hometown of Bucharest, erased by the regime of Ceausescu as a case example. For Helsinki Contemporary, Marinescu presents a new, photographic diptych, entitled Gravid, that includes a limited edition print. 

Onya McCausland (b. 1971) will create a site-specific ochre wall painting for the exhibition with iron oxide, a bi-product of iron mining across the world. Saltburn brings the British landscape to Finland in a very concrete way. The unique hue has been mixed from pigments found at the site of a former ironstone mine in East Cleveland, England. The installation is available in an edition of two, for site-specific reproduction in the same proportions. Each edition will include a digital print, depicting an aerial view of the Salturn landscape. McCausland’s painting is connected to her ongoing research collaboration with the British Coal Authority: Turning Landscape Into Colour. 

Outi Pieski (b. 1973) is known for her installations and paintings, which take a stand for the rights of indigenous peoples and examines their histories. Nature and the politics of sustainable development are prominent themes in the Sami artist’s works. Pieski has made new paintings for this exhibition, in a series inspired by the status of a legal person issued in some cultures to certain land areas. Pieski’s solo exhibition Čuolmmadit runs at EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art through January 6, 2019.

Artist, curator and researcher Keith Piper (b. 1960), is a black British artist of international significance whose practice responds to specific social and political issues, historical relationships and geographical sites. A founder member of the British BLK Art Group (active 1979-1984), Piper pioneered multi-media installation on a digital platform in the UK from the mid 1980’s. Mic Drop, his recent work exhibited in Helsinki, was commissioned by Beaconsfield in 2017. The piece takes as its starting point US President Obama’s use of a confrontational performative gesture dating back to 1980s Rap music and globalised in Obama’s final address at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Available in an edition of 5.

Philip Thompson (born 1988) is concerned with the way in which digital technologies have changed the way we perceive and produce contemporary art works. Working across disciplines including websites, video, sculpture and painting, Thompson explores the limitations of digital reproductions, as well as questioning the ethics present within these systems. He brings to the exhibition a work experienced through a mobile device, using footage filmed in Abogbloshie, the worlds largest digital waste dump, in Accra, Ghana.

Thomas Yeomans (b. 1986) works as a painter and across a range of digital media. A significant part of his practice focuses on sourcing and repurposing found digital material, characterized by a disruptive and destabilizing editing technique. Eventide is a fast-paced video work made from footage and sound the artist found and downloaded from the Internet. The work is meticulously re-edited into an arrangement that expresses the artist’s anger about the dramatic shifts he experienced in his personal landscape over the period of a year, which included the Brexit referendum in the UK.