Panel Session: ”Friday evenings at six o’clock”
Public art, Memory and the Finnish Civil War
Public art plays an important role in how wars are remembered. While statues, memorials and other public forms of remembrance can help to remember, they can also be a means of silencing and forgetting. Artist Love Antell, folklorist Anne Heimo and cultural historian Silja Laine discuss the aesthetic, cultural and ethical issues of public art and memories of the Finnish Civil War. While the civil war was a political event, the remembering of it has also affected public art and public space. How can historians, scholars and artists navigate these sensitive issues?
Memories of the war are the inspiration behind Antell’s new artwork Friday evenings at six o’clock. Antell’s virtual monument is in dialogue with Ismo Kajander’s physical monument 535, erected in 1994. By combining archival material from the historical site with current digital interventions in the physical environment, the piece exposes different time layers simultaneously.
After the session, there will be an opportunity to visit the virtual monument Friday evenings at six o’clock together as a group. You will need a smartphone and headphones for the visit.
Speakers
Love Antell, artist
Anne Heimo, Professor, University of Turku
Silja Laine, PhD, Docent, University of Turku
Love Antell (1980) is a multimedia music and visual artist based in Gothenburg, with Swedish-Finnish heritage. He holds a Master’s degree in Graphic Design and Illustration from Konstfack and has focused on animated light projections and digital media in public space. He has developed an artistic research project based out of the Stockholm University of the Arts, which includes Friday evenings at six o’clock as one of several planned works. The project explores the application of digital media at sites with a dissonant heritage, where the narrative lacks general consensus.
Anne Heimo is Professor of Folkloristics at the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies, University of Turku. She is specialised in oral history, memory studies, life writing research, and digital memory. Her research interests include the memory of the 1918 Finnish Civil War, memories of Finnish migrants and their descendants, and everyday life at the Paimio Sanatorium. She is a founding member and former chair of the Finnish Oral History Network (FOHN) and current co-chair of the European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC) Oral history and life stories network. From 2016 to 2018, she was the PI of the project Sirkkala 1918–2018: From prison camp to memory site and heritage site.
Silja Laine (PhD, Docent) is Senior Research Fellow and Docent in urban cultural history at the University of Turku. Her research interests cover urban history, literature, landscapes, and environmental humanities. In the field of urban history, she has recently written about public space, public art, cultural memory, and their intertwining.