As an integral and expanding part of the exhibition Enfleshed – Elaborated on view at Sinne until 23.5.2021, artists Kristiina Koskentola and Pia Lindman have invited anthropologist Stephan Dudeck, curator Jussi Koitela and curator and researcher You Mi to share and reflect on their research.

The discussion following the presentations will focus on diverse modes and temporalities of knowledge production: we dwell on topics such as relations and potentials of old and new knowledge, artistic research, power structures, ethics, polyvocality, and human and non-human knowledge.

The panel will be on Zoom and moderated by curator Yvonne Billimore.
The panel will be held in English.

Program schedule

15.00–15.10 Words of welcome
15.10–15.50 Stephan Dudeck
15.50–16.00 Break
16.00–16.30 You Mi
16.30–16.40 Break
16.40–17.10 Jussi Koitela
17.10–18.00 Discussion, open for audience comments and questions

About the program and the speakers

Stephan Dudeck:
“Siberian perspectivism – sharing the environment with human and non-human beings. Based on decade long collaboration with and learning from my Siberian friends, reindeer herders, scientists and activists my talk will introduce into some of the ideas, their relationship with the environment and between human and non-human beings is based on. Experiences are transmitted in polyphonic and multilayered ways of presentation, translation, and interpretation in the Khanty and Nenets stories, that contain what we might call indigenous knowledge. I will give an ethnographic commentary for a non-Khanty audience interested in the content and context of these stories and the messages the Khanty wish to deliver Stories of deserted places and uninhabited places tell about the precarity of human existence but provide also guidance how to deal with risk and danger and how to negotiate interaction with other beings.”

Stephan Dudeck is an anthropologist at the Centre for Arctic Social Studies, European University at Saint Petersburg, the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, and the Centre of Arctic and Siberian Exploration, Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences working with Siberian Indigenous peoples on oral history, gender, visual anthropology and human-animal relations.

You Mi
In this presentation, we will take a deep dive into Eurasia and trace various metamorphosis stories. Beyond their anthropological or art historical value, they provide us with cosmotechnics tools of relating to time and space differently. This further relates to embodied artistic practices as a way to access ancestral knowledge and work toward transformative mediation.

Dr. You Mi is a curator, researcher and lecturer at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Her long-term research and curatorial projects spin between the two extremes of the ancient and futuristic. She works with the Silk Road as a figuration for deep-time, deep-space nomadic imageries and old and new networks/technologies. Her academic interests are in media theory and performance philosophy, science and technology studies, as well as new and historical materialism.

Jussi Koitela
Curator Jussi Koitela presents “Thinking-with-Difference-Differently”. It is an attempt to write and think along with the artists’ practices. Simultaneously, it is a polyvocal mesh that gets constantly entangled with multiple challenges that those practices pose to orders of knowledge that are built on binaries, such as: nature/culture, spiritual/rational and human/non-human.

Jussi Koitela currently works as Head of Programme at Frame Contemporary Art Finland and as an independent curator. Lately his curatorial work has entangled art, embodied research methodlogies, feminist philosophy of science and materiality in different exhibitionary forms and modes of knowledge production. Koitela was a participant of De Appel Curatorial Programme in 2015/2016.

Yvonne Billimore as moderator
Yvonne Billimore is an artist-curator based between Helsinki and Scotland. Yvonne is associate curator of Rehearsing Hospitalities, Frame Contemporary Art Finland’s public programme for 2019 to 2023. Her work facilities situations for collective learning, exchange and experiences with particular attention given to feminist and ecological matters.

A preview of materials from the speakers is available at links below

Christian Vagt with Stephan Dudeck: Before the Snow (27’ 25)

https://youtu.be/OwtiINkdOTE

The film Before the Snow (2007, 27 min., dir. Christian Vagt) shows three Indigenous storytellers from Western Siberia who in different ways share their stories, experiences, and messages. They make it possible for an outsider’s public to explore their culture and region through stories of the dead and of ghosts, a fairy-tale, and warnings to respect the customs. The film was produced on a minimal budget but with ample support of the story-tellers themselves. Stories were chosen by the them on the request to tell something about the way Indigenous people deal with ghosts and the dead.