Conceptions of the world, life destinies, stories and memories are explored in Veli Granö's and Tuovi Hippeläinen's joint exhibition Rien – Is That All? – an exhibition that fills the whole of the museum's entrance floor with model trains, aura photographs, a lake dock and a small cinema.
This summer the two prominent Finnish artists Veli Granö and Tuovi Hippeläinen are being presented at Bildmuseet. Their works engages in our reality constructs; examines how values and worldviews arise. In particular, they privilege alternative or unorthodox conceptions of the world. Also memory processes surface as a central theme, especially the way collective memories or historical consensus confronts individual recollections.
The installation Islands by Veli Granö, a model train fitted with video cameras, is one of the exhibition’s centrepieces. The train runs on a circular track interlinked by several miniature winter landscapes (in sugar) – a model railway that takes up the entire space of one of the main exhibition halls. In the centre of the circular track, there is a corrugated-steel house holding a small cinema where pictures from the train are displayed in real time. Loudspeakers inside the theatre convey accounts by elderly people who remember harsh winters and hardships from a vanished era.
