Initiated in 2021, Coupling is an expanding series of curatorial projects, collaborations, or pairings, where two artists/ practitioners are introduced to one another for the first time and show together because of some common concerns within their work.

Our forth PUBLICS COUPLING with Helsinki based artist Maarit Mustonen and London based artist Vlatka Horvat Coupling comprises a public event, exhibition and series of window installations at PUBLICS for the month of June.

As part of their COUPLING, Maarit and Vlatka, joined by Paul O’Neill, will engage in a public conversation about their practices, discussing the various points of connection explored in their joint presentation at PUBLICS on 8th June between 5-7pm.

Exhibition is open during PUBLICS Wednesdays – Friday between 12–6pm and by appointment until the end of June 2023.

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Maarit Mustonen 

Mustonen’s Plural is a new artist’s book describing an arranged meeting between nine people called Maarit Mustonen. The leporello form brings together nine voices talking about their own name, the memories and experiences connected to it. The other side of the pages presents an image of a long paper marbling pattern, a fluid form that suggests movement and mixing. The graphic design of the book is by Pauliina Nykänen, the book binding by Esko Salonen. Plural is published by Multipöly, a publishing collective Maarit founded with graphic designer, text artist and professor Arja Karhumaa in 2021. Multipöly wishes to probe publishing as a concept, as a site, and as a practice. Pöly is Finnish for dust or pollen, a metaphor for stirring and scattering.

Shown alongside new work made from dust jackets selected and taken away from PUBLICS Library shelves and reconfigured as emergent sculptural forms. The dustjackets protecting the book objects will function as material for an installation highlighting the ”body” of the book, its presence/absence and time.

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Vlatka Horvat

As part of COUPLING, Vlatka Horvat will present a new incarnation of her site-responsive installation Reinforcements, as well as a new work on paper titled Soft Spine (Concertina), placed into a dialogue with both the PUBLICS library and with Maarit Mustonen’s concertina publication.

Horvat’s Reinforcements comprises wooden sticks connected with tape into longer poles, to make fragile structures stretching from the floor to the ceiling. On the one hand, these low-fi constructions of “dumb” materials evoke human-made support structures, such as pillars and columns, construction scaffolding, crutches and other contraptions intended to stabilize or hold things in place. A playfully foolhardy effort, the piece stages a certain misguided attempt to “fix” a non-existent problem of stability of the room by inserting what appears as load-carrying props under the room’s ceiling. On the other hand, the sticks conjure an impoverished natural landscape – vines, trees and bushes – a decidedly pathetic forest simulation made of found bits, wooden offcuts and parts of disused objects, which the viewer is invited to navigate as they might navigate a fragile natural environment. 

Reinforcements continues a strand of Horvat’s sculptural works which place objects and materials in a state of precarious balance, temporarily held in place using principles of tension and counterpoise, without the aid of hardware or adhesives. By jamming her fragile contraptions between the floor and the ceiling, Horvat appears to be taking a measure of the space, bridging the distance between its extreme points – at once interrupting the cavity of the room with irregular jagged verticals while drawing attention to the physical edges of the room’s architecture and the confining nature of the built space.

Another new work by Horvat made for the occasion, titled Soft Spine (Concertina), continues a strand of recent pieces made with handmade paper, fabrics and bookbinding thread whereby pieces of fabric are stitched between two sheets of paper – a gesture that simultaneously connects two pages as well as keeps them apart – to create a form of a rudimentary book. As in Reinforcements, there is a sense of connecting, dividing, marking and measuring – of time, of intervals, of space of the room and the space of the paper, through the simple interaction of the two materials. Through a sequence of paper and textiles, Horvat constructs a long object which can be presented as a flat piece when fully opened but which becomes a sculptural proposition when partially closed and folded in space. The work approaches the page – and by extension the book – as a sculptural object rather than a surface to be inscribed.

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In addition to presenting their individual works alongside one another, Maarit and Vlatka will collaborate on the new edition of Eurantie Window Publication, an experimental spatial publication Maarit edits with Arja Karhumaa in the Multipöly Room windows in Vallila. Presented across the windows of Multipöly and PUBLICS the publication stages a meeting of two different strands of materials, each approaching the window as not only the substrate carrying the text but also as its subject. Maarit’s strand of short statements reveals the two spaces’ previous purpose, and Vlatka’s strand summons from memory the view out the window at her five previous places of residence. Speaking to the street and the passerbys, and explicitly addressing the relation between the inside and the outside, between looking out and looking in, between memory and perception, the publication is borne out of the two artists’ shared interest in expanded publishing formats.

Multipöly Room, Eurantie 8–10 LH09 / Publics, Sturenkatu 37-41, 4B

Maarit Mustonen

Maarit Mustonen (b. 1986 Vantaa) is a Helsinki based artist working with text, image, performance and installation. Questions of language and communication are central to her work. By examining language’s relation to image and body her work creates connections with poetry. Maarit’s working process often has a personal starting point which she combines with conceptual and/or experimental working methods. She holds an MFA in Time and Space Arts from the University of the Arts Helsinki (2015), BA in Photography from Lahti Institute of Art and Design (2012) and B.Soc.Sc. in Communication & Media Studies from the University of Helsinki (2009). Her work has been recently shown at Zilberman Gallery in Istanbul (2022), Angewandte Innovation Lab in Vienna (2022) and Pitted Dates in Helsinki (2023). Maarit’s work in COUPLING has been supported by Kone Foundation and Arts Promotion Centre Finland. https://maaritmustonen.com/

Vlatka Horvat

Vlatka Horvat works across a wide range of forms, from sculpture, installation, drawing, collage and photography to performance, video, writing and publishing. Her work is presented internationally in a variety of contexts – in museums and galleries, theatre and dance festivals and in public space. Recent exhibitions include: PEER London, Kunsthalle Wien, Croatian national Pavilion at the 16th Architecture Biennale, Museums Sheffield, Theater Spektakel Zurich, Renata Fabbri (Milan), GAEP Gallery (Bucharest), Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies (NY), Wilfried Lentz Gallery (Rotterdam), CAPRI (Düsseldorf). Her performances have been commissioned by venues across Europe, North America and beyond, including HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), LIFT – London International Festival of Theatre, PACT Zollverein (Essen), Tanzquartier Wien (Vienna), Outpost for Contemporary Art (LA), KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen (Hannover) and many others. Born in Croatia when it was part of Yugoslavia, she moved to the US as a teenager. After twenty years in the States, she currently lives in London, where she teaches in the Fine Art department at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. www.vlatkahorvat.com