DIVERS MEMORIES

“Muistoja Syvältä is the latest exhibiton by the Divers Memories Project. The imaginations of over seventy artists have been fused with the reservoir of Karelian history and culture at Pielisen Museum. Divers Memories is the outcome of a decade of work by the artist Chris Dorsett at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. More recently his concept has taken on an international identity as a large-scale research project funded by the Department of Visual and Performing Arts in the University of Northumbria at Newcastle. Muistoja Syvältä is one of a series of exhibitions which the project is initiating museums throughout the UK and Europe.” 15 May – 15 September 1996

1
SPLIT/SUITE: The Making of Finland in Three Movements
Collaboration: Christy Johnson and Roz Mortimer
Pielisen Museum, Lieksa, Finland
6 min video, 1996

SPLIT/SUITE obliquely refers to Finland’s history of divided territory and moving boundaries. The work was sited in the entrance of main building of the Pielisen Museum. Johnson and Mortimer chose to draw attention to the domestic collection in the main building by using objects such as blonde hair, dough, fish, quilt fabric, and birch for their simple performances to camera. Three ‘movements’ use the structure of repetition and splitting alongside Maame, the Finnish National Anthem.

2
VIHTA
Collaboration: Christy Johnson and Roz Mortimer
Pielisen Museum, Lieksa, Finland
Performance/Intervention in Sauna No. 60, 1996

In Finland the sauna has historically been the place in which women have performed the life-cycle rituals from birthing to washing the dead. Drawing from this history, Johnson and Mortimer chose Sauna No. 60 to site VIHTA. This intervention explored the sauna as a site of transformation and the body’s transition in this context. A performance took place – a photograph taken every 5 minutes – giving evidence to the initiatory experience of experiencing extreme heat and using birch to stimulate the skin. The individual SX-70s were sutured onto the existing metal grill separating the viewer from the sauna space. As one approached, sound was triggered - the transition from pain to pleasure being heard.

3
MODEL HOUSE
Pielisen Museum
Intervention (main building), 1996

4
TRUSS
CDAK Exhibition, Seoul, Korea, 2001

TRUSS questions the relationship between support and vulnerability within domestic structures and draws from Johnson’s intervention (1996) in the ‘Model House’ section of the Pielisen Museum in Lieksa, Finland. The diptych intervention becomes the central image of the triptych.