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. Two distinct exhibitions intersect at PUBLICS as part of this third Coupling where sound artist Marja Ahti and visual artist Mikko Kuorinki are coupled with multimedia artist and writer Elisabeth Molin. Live program on Friday 6th starts at 5pm with Elisabeth Molin’s performative reading not from concentrate and as part of the event, Molin serves a tea made from oak bark extract. Marja Ahti will then perform a live music set using and reorganizing sounds from the installation intertwined with other electronic and acoustic sound sources.
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For this show, each artist has responded to PUBLICS’ invitation by taking time to be in dialogue with each other around their particular, and sometimes shared processes and attention given to the publicness of materiality, textualities and resonances within their practices. Each artist exploring ideas together whilst retaining their autonomy, this coupling has culminated into two separate, new and distinctive responses to specific context at PUBLICS Library, responding to its colourful sliding doors, the speckled surface of the concrete floors, array of pipes, exposed infrastructure, cavities, cracks, and its sonic traces within and outside its street level windows. Each artist has taken their own response to theses spaces and to the public life of materials, their matter, sites and sounds offering a cohesive yet open ended premise for their emergent layers, relations, and co-mingling.

Exhibition is open during PUBLICS Library opening hours on Wednesdays between 12–6pm and by appointment until the end of May 2022.
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Elisabeth Molin
your ink my glitch

Elisabeth Molin’s new works at PUBLICS explore ecology of images, thinking about their infrastructures and how we see through and with images. These ecologies, of relations, ask how we recycle, share and distribute images. How can the processes of cutting, altering and re-purposing images change the meaning of images? What do the notions and acts of spreading, erasure and loss of representation ask of agencies, and senses of belonging leftover within images and their representations.

Molin’s show combines three distinct components. your ink my glitch (2022) is a new site-responsive wall installation intervening with the sliding doors of the library and the adjacent wall. The work creates multiple overlapping layers between physical and imagined infrastructure and the tactility and the shift in meaning that happens as the sliding doors are being used. Molin’s second new work is a video called all.the.time (2022), a visual and textual montage exploring the textures and materiality of time in the digital media. The montage combines footage where time is marked in gestures such as evaporation, pulses, glitches and time lines. The third and final part of Molin’s response to Coupling, is not from concentrate – a live performative reading combining texts from previous publications; Lies and Diet Coke, Black Rooms, (yet), as well as new texts reflecting on ideas of failures in representation and a floating time feeling.
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Mikko Kuorinki & Marja Ahti
Shrine (Aether)

Shrine (Aether), (2022) is a collaborative installation of objects and sounds by Mikko Kuorinki and Marja Ahti. The work is a continuation of Kuorinki’s on-going series of shrines and Ahti’s compositional pieces organising sounds of everyday objects, materials, and spaces into quietly charged constellations.

The sounds and objects in the installation are poetically/ energetically linked to each other as well as the room and surrounding environment. They combine everyday materials – artificial, organic, decrepit, mint, momentary, timeless – in a gesture releasing them from their usual practical function and giving them another. If the shrines have function it is simply to affect the space they are in and those taking care of them. Some of the items have a lot of personal meaning attached to them and some have none. Some are loaded and some empty. Some are placed within the shrine as a means of becoming charged, with meaning and value. Sounding events within the shrine are part of the on-going vibration of the material world. Whereas each audible object have their own distinctive qualities, placed to the shelf with their temporary particularities.

Ahti’s and Kuorinki’s practices are connected through a shared sensibility for matter and materiality, a focus on the act of listening and looking and through an orientation towards experiencing seemingly commonplace details. Their practices share an attentiveness towards the overlooked (often everyday-like) materials, spaces, sounds, objects and how their details often reveal poetry.

“To restore silence is the role of objects”
(S. Beckett “Molloy”)
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Marja Ahti (b. 1981, Luleå) is a sound artist and composer based in Turku. Her practice spans experimental music, sound art and performance. Working with field recordings and other acoustic sound material combined with electronics and feedback, her music happens in a zone between the acoustic and the documentaristic, moving from abstraction and the deeply familiar into a poetic realm. In recent years, Ahti has released three solo albums under her own name and worked in a variety of collaborations. She is also active as an organiser in the Himera collective.

Mikko Kuorinki was born in Rovaniemi in 1977. He started his artistic practise when he was 15-years old by releasing zines and music. Nowadays he lives in Espoo and works mainly in the context of visual art by making installations, publications and happenings out of objects and texts. Materials of the works can be objects, rooms, texts, bits of songs, found and manufactured. Certain idea of documentarism is in the center of Kuorinki’s practise: he grabs on to what is at hand because of ten it is this seemingly meaningless and mundane material unfolds to him as a mystery. Beside his own practise he is part of Hello dust and Happy Magic Society.

Elisabeth Molin (b. 1985 Denmark) graduated from Chelsea College of art in 2009 and from Royal College of Art in 2013 and has since shown her work, among other placed, at KW Institute, Berlin; BB15, Linz; MK Gallery, Milton Keynes; Wiels, Brussels; Belmacz, London; Sixty Eight Institute, Copenhagen; Austrian Cultural Forum, London, and ISCP, New York. She has shown her videos as part of the 32nd Images Festival in Toronto, the 31 Stuttgarter Filmwinter in Stuttgart and the 7th Medrar Video Festival in Cairo.