Images from day 3 of 2019 Festival - Breaking the Fifth Wall, words by Steve Maher and photos by Antti Ahonen.

Dear Diary, 

Day three of our seven day festival is underway. 

We follow up two days of launches, a group exhibition of invited artists at SOLU (featuring Varvara and Mar, Dries Depoorter, Heyon Han and Pixelache's own Bio-Signals team on day one) and a solo exhibition at MAA-Tila (Circuit Breaker by Samir Bhowmik on day 2). 

Day Three begins with the first of a three day workshop series lead by Jan Lütjohann called "Working with Hands in a Post-Industrial Society".  The project focuses on the tactile use of hand tools in the manipulation of wood, a practice of traditional hand carpentry through which participants can activate pre-industrial technology to get over established narratives of craft and take a critical approach to do-it-yourself. The workshops took place in Kontula in partnership with our friends at The Museum of Impossible Forms. 

Artist Jan Lütjohann takes a very brief moment to sit down while leading the workshop. 

Once again, a 2019 festival would not be complete without an ample supply of rescued waste food, provided by our friends at KERU , the Kallio Settlementi  based "community refrigerator". Fresh fruit and vegetables that might have ended up in a landfill instead nourishing our body, minds and souls. 

With a very brief window of opportunity between festival activities, resident photographer extraordinaire Antti Ahonen makes his way across town to the peninsula of Katajanokka to document the static works exhibition. 

Data Shop -- Varvara and Mar, the artist's personal data, archived and stored in cans and displayed in a shop format, as if ready for sale.

Bio-Signals Archive, a Pixelache Project headed by members Mikko Lipiäinen, Juan Duarte and Andrew Paterson. The audio archive presents to the public the work undertaken by the Bio-Signals project team, it was supported by Nordisk Kultur Kontakt. 

A new work by Dries Depoorter, commissioned by Pixelache called Quick-Fix debuts at this years festival, Quick-Fix is an invention and art work created by Depoorter which allows customers to easily access "Like-Farms" through a kiosk like device. Simply input a coin and select the preferred number of followers or likes for a post. 

In the back rooms of SOLU, a private cinema has been created to present the video works of Heyon Han, Han's video work Instant Materialisms cycles the audience through psychodelic ramen noodle based Kaleidoscopic fever dreams all the while subliminal electronic music and messages drive through your brain propelled by heavy bass subwoofer. 

Antti makes his way back across town to attend the first night of the B.F. Film Fest, a visiting festival brought over from London by artist and curator Beth Fox.  The festival took place over two nights at the Oranssi in Suvilahti. The BF Artist Film Festival is a critical platform for artists working with moving image. Open to national and international artists, the festival program is selected via a recurring open call held 3 times annually.

Concurrently, at the launch of the festival's first night of Film, Ali Akbar Mehta and Vidha Saumya produce the second night of their Direct Contact // Feedback project. The Perfect blending of Food as art and film as Art. Here, Ali presents the project to the audience prior to the first screening from the BF Film Fest.

In the word's of the projects creators 

Through direct-contact, we stage a ‘time travel’ to Colonial India, where the chapati (a form of unleavened bread) becomes the site for agency, insurrection and community, and then move back forward in time through a history of roti, (and bread in general), which is fraught with radically charged associations: of nobility (let them eat cake), Communist equality (those who grow it, will eat it), institutionalised poverty, where workers, day-wage earners, labourers and farmers carry rotis, salt, and an onion for a ‘working lunch’, and of institutionalised capitalism, where it is preferable for food grain to be burnt than donated. With this radically round low-tech weapon, this imperfect tool, how can we strategically engage with and resist the socio-political of the neo-liberal, xenophobic, and far-right positions of today? In a time where food in Finland is forced to undergo the strenuous processes of contactless cooking (forcing cafeterias to use pre-cutting, prewashing with sanitizers, dehydration process, and other ‘healthy’ cooking methodologies), what capitalist insurrections do eating a food that is necessarily made by ‘direct contact’ and eating with unassisted fingers, mean?

Finally another night of chasing the sun with Brigitte Kovac's project Walking Encounters, this time traversing the allotments and summer cottages of Kulosaari. 

The half way mark of our festival will be tomorrow, in the middle of the day. Rather than exhaustion, and in spite of our hard work, we are energised and as it turns out justifiably optimistic about what is due to come. 

Looking forward to seeing you then, 

Is mise le meas agus le cairdeas,

Steve