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 fifth PUBLICS COUPLING with Australian-based artist Eugenia Lim and Helsinki-based artist Anu Pennanen comprises a hybrid film screening at PUBLICS and at Composite in Naarm/Melbourne.
As part of their COUPLING, Eugenia Lim and Anu Pennanen will be joined by Stephane Querrec — PALO Art Productions, who will engage in a public conversation about their practices, discussing the various points of connection explored in their work preceding the screening of their short films at PUBLICS on October 1st from 2pm.
Timeline
2 – 3pm Artist talk — Anu Pennanen and Eugenia Lim (who will join via zoom) in conversation with Stephane Querrec, Palo Art Productions
3 – 3:30pm Break
3.30-4.15pm Film screenings
For more information on the Melbourne screening, visit Composite HERE
Film screening
5, 10, 100 YEARS FROM NOW (2023)
Anu Pennanen
Single-channel 4 K video, 17:00, colour, stereo sound
5, 10, 100 YEARS FROM NOW is a short experimental video essay about the future in an era of resource-based conflict and global environmental crisis. The work is based on petrol-station customers wild reflections on what they imagine the future will look like seen from the window of a Neste- gas station in Helsinki: the development of transport and technology and climate change, colony on Mars, human consciousness replaced by machines, street sides heated by burning barrels of rubbish, or information giants supplanting nation states. The video weaves together people’s imagination with associative imagery, where the circulation of cars and the filling of petrol tanks, the endlessly rotating fossil economy’s movement, is associated with Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, echoing the same inexorable, massive progression as the fossil-fuel economy that was deemed necessary – until coming to an abrupt halt.
Project credits:
Director, Screenwriter, Editor, Graphic Design: Anu Pennanen
Cinematographer: Kerttu Hakkarainen
Sound Designer: Salla Hämäläinen
Sound recordist: Jonne Järvinen
Colorist: Hannu Käki
Production: PALO Art Productions
Producer: Stéphane Querrec
Production assistant: Leena Nuorteva
Production runner: Kasimir Eskola
English translation: Patricia Chen
Music: BOLÉRO, Written by Maurice Ravel.
Performed by Louis Frémaux and London Symphony Orchestra
Courtesy of Collins Classics under license
from Phoenix Music International Limited
Thank you:
All the anonymous interviewees
Neste Munkkiniemi gas station staff
Terttu, Pentti and Jani Pennanen
Hanna-Kaisa Korolainen, Salme and Ilja Goursot
Tellervo Kalleinen
With the support of:
AVEK Media Art / Milla Moilanen
PUBLICS Helsinki / Paul O’Neill
Metabolism (2023)
Eugenia Lim
Single-channel 2K video, 29:15, colour, sound
A portrait of a living, working ecology and the multi-species it sustains, Metabolism is an artist film that considers the body-as-land and land-as-body.
Filmed around the site of the Western Treatment Plant (WTP) in Werribee, Victoria, Australia, Metabolism considers metabolism as an ambivalent process that connects external and internal forces: from chemical energy-creation within our bodies, to capitalism’s ‘metabolic rift’. For the Wadawurrung people, Wirribi-yaluk (Werribee river) is the backbone and spine of Country, a waterway that has sustained life since time immemorial. Wirribi-yaluk runs along the eastern edge of the WTP, a living and flowing entity connecting old ways with new. Since colonisation, the land, waters and air of this place have been drastically shaped to produce and metabolise food, waste, energy and water. New housing developments with names like ‘Riverwalk’ and ‘Manor Lakes’ spring up within smelling distance of effluent ponds in an ongoing process of birth, death and renewal. Through multiscalar ‘ways of seeing’, in Metabolism, bodies are porous and interconnected—from the microscopic to the planetary.
Created across seasons, in dialogue with the site-as-protagonist, Metabolism considers the interdependencies between human and more-than-human bodies, interior and exterior ecologies, and the consumption, colonisation and capitalisation of body-as-land.
Project credits:
Director, Lead Artist, Editor: Eugenia Lim
Cinematographer: Tim Hillier
Composer, Sound Designer: Carolyn Schofield (Fia Fiell)
Drone Operators: Trent Perrett and Glenn Hester
Production Coordinator: Bianca Chang
Wadawurrung Cultural Advisors: Stephanie Skinner and Corinna Eccles
Performers: Lee Wan and Harshanie Habarakadage
Western Treatment Plant Operations: Peter Kissonergis
Colourist and Post: Chris Tomkins
Title Design: Amery Oke-Johnston (Thought & Found)
Sound Mastering: Recording Engineer: Pat Telfer
Artistic Advisors: Amos Gebhardt and Gabrielle Brady
Metabolism was filmed on and in the lands, waters and skies of the Wadawurrung. We pay our deep respect to the sovereign traditional custodians of this place for their deep, ongoing practice of care for country, kin and culture.
Commissioned by Public Art Commission, Deakin University and the City of Wyndham.
With the support of PUBLICS Helsinki and Paul O’Neill.
Eugenia would like to thank: Peter Kissonergis, Paul Balassone, Catherine Rees, Lee Wan and Harshanie Habarakadage at Melbourne Water; Trisha-lee Donavan at Wadawurrung Aboriginal Corporation; David Cross, Cameron Bishop, Simon Reis and the Public Art Commission team; Paul O’Neill and PUBLICS; Amelia Wallin, Anu Pennanen and Stéphane Querrec; Gabrielle Brady and Amos Gebhardt for creative support; and all her Metabolism collaborators, human and more-than-human.
BIO
Eugenia Lim
Eugenia Lim is an artist of Chinese-Singaporean ancestry who works across body, lens, social and spatial practice to explore how migration, capital and encounter cut, divide and bond our interdependent world. Based in Melbourne, Australia, on unceded Wurundjeri lands in the Kulin Nation, Lim has shown at the Tate Modern (GBR), LOOP Barcelona (ESP), Recontemporary (IT), Kassel Dokfest (DE), Museum of Contemporary Art (AU), ACCA (AU), FACT Liverpool (GBR), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (DK) and EXiS (KR). She co-founded CHANNELS Festival, co-wrote and hosted Video Becomes Us on ABC iView and is a former co-director at APHIDS. Lim has been artist-in-residence with the Experimental Television Centre (NY), Bundanon Trust, 4A Beijing Studio, and Gertrude Contemporary. Lim is a 2022 Sidney Myer Creative Fellow and winner of Charlottenborg Spring’s 2022 Deep Forest Art Land Award.
Eugenia is represented by STATION, Australia.
Anu Pennanen
Anu Pennanen is an artist and filmmaker based in Helsinki. Her work explores the way we deal with urbanisation and the effects of globalisation on the way we live. At the intersection of visual art, film and architecture, it features people who question the built environment they are part of. Pennanen’s creations always start with a concrete and real space, a territory close to her: it allows her to practise something very close to life, which has to do with history, anthropology, archaeology and existential problems. Her works have been exhibited extensively: CCA Glasgow (UK); Frankfurter Kunstverein (DE); White Box New York (US); Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Auckland (NZ); Grand Café Saint-Nazaire (FR); KunstenFestivaldesArts Brussels (BE) Frans Hals Museum (NL); Liverpool, Istanbul, SCAPE, Manifesta, Momentum and Moscow Biennials and Kiasma Museum Helsinki (FI) among others. www.anupennanen.com
Amelia Wallin is a curator and writer, living on Djaara in regional Australia. Across her career she has collaborated with renowned artists, festivals and organisations to commission and deliver ambitious performances and exhibitions in Australia and the USA. She is curator at La Trobe Art Institute, formerly Director of West Space and has held positions at Biennale of Sydney, Performance Space and Campbelltown Arts Centre. She is a graduate of the Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and current PhD candidate at Monash University.
Stéphane Querrec
Artist Manager and Producer PALO Art Productions.
Stéphane Querrec is a Finland-based Basque-French Artist manager and Producer specialised in conceptual and experimental art projects on the cusp of visual arts, sound, film and performance. As the co-founder and director of PALO, a support structure based in Helsinki, Querrec has over the last few years been involved in the leadership, development, production of more than twenty artworks, partnering with institutions in Finland and abroad.
Read more about PALO Art Productions here.
Composite – Melbourne
Composite Moving Image Agency & Media Bank is an Artist-Run agency dedicated to supporting artists’ moving image practices in Australia through exhibition, research, education and distribution. Composite hosts a year-round exhibition program; facilitate screening events, workshops and education programs; build an online database of artists’ video and film works; develop a distribution and licensing model for Australian artists video and film works; and house a Media Bank to provide free loans of technical equipment for artists working with moving image. Read more about Composite here.