Bridge Over Troubled Water (Exhibition)
MSL (Jade Kallio, Antti Jussila) & Jaakko Pallasvuo
Sinne Gallery, Helsinki, 2017
The Bridge Over Troubled Water exhibition is the result of a collaboration between the artist duo MSL (Antti Jussila & Jari Kallio) and Jaakko Pallasvuo. The work shown at Sinne is a 30-minute video that has its beginnings in 2014.
Bridge Over Troubled Water sheds light on topical phenomena and ideas of relevance to our current ecological and political crisis. The video is a collage constructed around the feeling of frustration and meaninglessness that people get when they are unable to influence their constantly accelerating circumstances. The work views our own fossil existence from an extended time perspective. The film’s main characters are the folk-rock icons Paul Simon & Art Garfunkel. We follow their journey in time from 1967 right up to 10,000 AD. They move around in time and space, seeking an answer to their constantly growing anxiety. Climate change is a fact, the battle to prevent an environmental catastrophe becomes paramount, and the singers fall silent as emptiness takes over. Their friendship is rocked, but new technology makes it possible for new dimensions and new states of existence to open up. But technology chooses its own direction; it turns its back on us and flees from us and all our human afflictions.
MSL’s members, Antti Jussila (b. 1979) and Jari Kallio (b. 1978), both graduated from Turku Art Academy. They have been doing performances, videos and music together since 2008. Jaakko Pallasvuo (b. 1987) works in numerous different techniques and switches freely between the moving image, comics, text and sculpture. Both MSL and Pallasvuo attach great importance to collaborating with other artists. They also share an interest in identity, patterns of social behaviour, and the formation of the individual’s physical and mental responses to their surroundings.