Tectonic Plate (dir. Mika Taanila) and Return of The Atom (dir. Mika Taanila and Jussi Eerola) will be screened at Midnight Sun Film Festival 15.-19.6.2016. Both screenings are followed by a Q&A. Tectonic Plate will be shown in its original Finnish language version (“Mannerlaatta“).
link to festival program 1
link to festival program 2
The feature film Tectonic Plate has been selected to the official program of the 70th Edinburgh Film Festival. The film is screening in “Black Box” strand at Filmhouse 3 on Wednesday June 22 at 18:00, followed by Q&A with Mika Taanila.
Kirjailijan valinta (“Author’s Choice”) is a summer exhibition curated by Anu Halmesmaa together with eleven contemporary Finnish authors. Each of the authors has selected one visual artist for show. Mika Taanila selected by Laura Lindstedt.
Dates: 12.6.–14.8.2016
Venue: Pinxinmäki, Sysmä, Finland
link to exhibition (in Finnish only)
Taanila’s contribution to the show is a single-channel video installation My Silence (2013) and two photograms from the series Black and White Movies (2013).
The single-channel video installation My Silence is part of a group show entitled “My Silence, Hiljaisuuden ääni” (“My Silence, The Sound of Silence”) at Kuopio Art Museum 12.2.–28.5.2016.
The focal point of this exhibition is silence, works of art which are restrained and plain but deep and impressive in their simplicity. How does the silence of art sound?
Exhibition is a cross-section of the works of the contemporary art acquired to Kuopio Art Museum collections in the 2000s. On display are photos and video art, paintings, drawings and sculptures made by artists like Ilkka Halso, Nanna Hänninen, Antti Immonen, Ari Kakkinen, Anne Koskinen, Anni Leppälä, Jaakko Niemelä, Pauno Pohjolainen, Riitta Päiväläinen, Heli Ryhänen, Jaakko Rönkkö, Riitta Rönkkö, Perttu Saksa, Jyrki Siukonen, Anne Tompuri, Mika Taanila ja Jan Kenneth Weckman, among others.
Tectonic Plate is screening at Cinema Theatre Arthouse Momo in Seoul, South Korea on Wednesday the 25th of May (20:30h). The event is part of ”S.O.S. – Art for a Time of Urgencies”, the 9th Ewha International Media Art Presentation, curated by Pontus Kyander.
S.O.S. –Save Our Souls is a large scale project to respond to the 130 year anniversary of Ewha Womans University.
Tectonic Plate is screening at Basel’s Bildrausch Filmfest on Thursday 26 May, 2016 at 22:40, followed by a Q&A with Mika Taanila. The venue is Stadtkino Basel.
Tectonic Plate is a cameraless film about fear of flying, security checks and time zones.
After returning from a lengthy business trip to Tokyo, the nameless protagonist is inexplicably stuck at a hotel nearby the Helsinki airport. The events are fixed to the character’s life-style of constant jet lag and multitasking. The use of various technical devices, such as phones, computers and heart rate monitors, slivers his time-management and modifies the consciousness.
The episodes of on-screen texts and of moving image alternate in the narration of this dualistic work.
The techniques used for the moving images are photocopying documents related to air-travel directly onto clear 35mm film and darkroom exposure of objects placed on 35mm reversal film (photograms).
”In the ’camera-less’ experiment Tectonic Plate, visual-artist Mika Taanila’s photograms and poet Harry Salmenniemi’s stark intertitles simulate the jet-laggy anxiety of international air travel. Pages from security pamphlets are distorted into rough particles of grain; a five-minute zoom-out transforms words into geometric patterns. These shifts between legibility and abstraction often literally force the viewer’s eyes to refocus, dislocating both cognitive and sensory perception; the resulting dissociative panic produces a very bodily feeling of free fall. The physically droughts photograms, which alternatively evoke encephalographs or airport x-rays of carry-on items, anchor the out-of-body paranoia in an unshakable tactility.”
– Chloe Lizotte, Film Comment
Distributed by Light Cone (Paris) and AV-arkki (Helsinki).
VOD rent or buy here:
buy Blu-ray Box Set at Lux Shop (London)
Selected screenings:
The lettrist feature film Tectonic Plate (2016, 74 min) is screening at Cinematek – the Royal Cinémathèque of Belgium as part of Art Brussels, courtesy of balzer projects, Basel. The cinema program is called Seeing in the Dark and curated by Belgian artist Anouk De Clercq.
Time and venue: 19 April at 17:30, Salle Ledoux, Cinematek.
link to full program “Seeing in the Dark”
