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Sofi Häkkinen
2-11 Juli
Vernissage fredag 2 juli 17-20
Makaroni Live Vanitas I
I keep coming back to one mind-consuming problem: time. I keep longing for the past or the future, constantly. This is one big reason why I make art: through art, I am able to sort of stop time and condense a moment or a fleeting thought into a comprehensible form – for a short while at least. To travel in time, but most of all, to stop time.
There is one good thing about the passing of time, though, and that is forgetting. I think it’s great that the human mind (often) forgets a lot of things. Our neurotypical brains compare everything we see to our memories of the world, and I can’t imagine what remembering every single detail of it would be like.
This passing of time, both irritating and fascinating, is present in 3D art objects like sculptures. I can’t remember exactly what the lump-like dry pasta sculpture looks like from the other side as I move around it. I can never remember every single nook and bulge, I can never see or remember the object fully. It’s almost like how one can never see themselves fully (and don’t even think about the skeleton inside of you!). The brain adds things together as we look at the work, and gives it that certain aura of an artwork, all those different meanings.
This is how I go looking for something humane on the surface of pasta. I let the scale of the sculptures turn the tiny unimportant pieces of material into a bigger surreal entity. Dry pasta turns into something magical and almost ceremonial when it is used as a material of art. The hollow tubes seem quite alive, glued into a pattern that I cannot fully control. It is what it is.
I think the idea of kitsch and the surreal nature of vanitas are perfectly captured in the two sculptures that I will bring to ID:I Galleri. The life-size skeleton made out of pasta, and the ambiguous lump both represent time in their own ways, also incorporating humor – which is an ever-present theme in my artistic practice.
Finnish visual artist Sofi Häkkinen (b. 1990) brings her pasta sculptures to Stockholm’s ID:I Galleri in July 2021. In her art, Häkkinen explores themes of time, mortality, human connection, moments, food and surreal pop. Dry pasta has been involved in Häkkinen’s art as inspiration and material for years, and lately it has taken different forms in sculptures. Makaroni Live Vanitas I is the first exhibition of a trilogy that explores the classic vanitas themes from the passing of time to the mortality of the human body.
Sofi Häkkinen is a visual artist and director from Finland. She works widely in different fields of art, mainly as a visual artist with her own practice, and as a founding member and leader of Recover Laboratory – a Finnish pioneer group of immersive and site-specific performance. Häkkinen holds a Master’s Degree in Art and has exhibited in many different group and solo shows. In addition to Häkkinen’s work in visual arts as a sculptor and her work in immersive art, she also works as a video artist in different productions ranging from TV series to VJ gigs and multi-artistic performances.