Waiting room (Pigs) – 16ch immersive sound installation / Directing and concept : Terike Haapoja & Laura Gustafsson / Field sound recording and installation: Jaakko Autio

Waiting Room is a 16-channel sound installation that presents the sounds of pigs on a Finnish farm. The piece was created by the artist duo Terike Haapoja and Laura Gustafsson, who explore the relationship between humans and animals as well as societal issues in their works. The 16-channel installation was recorded and implemented by Jaakko Autio. “Waiting Room” has been exhibited in various locations including Zone2Source in Amsterdam, Seinäjoki Art Hall, and at the Montoro12 exhibition in Brussels. The goal of the piece is to spark discussions about the relationship with nature and animal rights.

Gustafsson&Haapoja is a collaboration project since 2012. The project started out by exploring history and society from the perspective of other species and has progressed to dismantle the concepts of humans and animals and how they relate to the mechanisms of racism, sexism and social exclusion. In the works of Gustafsson&Haapoja, there is an idea of utopia and the possibility of a different world. Haapoja and Gustafsson combine poetry with a documentary approach in their work. Their art extends from installation and video art to performances, and their works often reveal the theatrical background of both artists. The artists attempt to link their exhibitions to social context through discussions, writings and actions.

WAITING ROOM @ MONTORO12 CONTEMPORARY BRUSSELS, 7.9 – 11.11.2023

Curator: Ursula Hawlitschka / Featuring: Hanien Conradie (South Africa),  Gustafsson & Haapoja (Finland, NYC),  Kate Javens (NYC) Hartmut Kiewert (Germany), Maximilian Prüfer (Germany), ROA (Belgium), Wade Schuman (NYC),  Vanessa von Zitzewitz (Germany, living in Monte Carlo), Janice Wright Cheney (Canada)

Montoro12 Gallery is proud to present Animal Power!, a group exhibition of nine international artists – many exhibiting in Brussels for the first time – exploring non-human animals in fascinating works comprising installation, video, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and textile art. From 07 September to 28 October 2023 I will be represented with some works in the exhibition “Animal Power!” at MONTORO12 Gallery in Brussels. The exhibition is part of the Brussels Gallery Weekend. The exhibition is curated by Ursula Hawlitschka.

In recent years there has been a great profusion of scholarly writing in the interdisciplinary field of animal studies (animals as sentient beings, the moral status of animals, animal rights etc.) as well as a changing view on animals in general – from considering animals merely as objects for entertainment, food, or other (in)human use to an interest in new discoveries scientists and ethologists constantly make about the mental and emotional capacities of animals. Just as we cannot live without nature on this earth, we cannot live without animals (e.g. bees!) and our (ab)use of animals in intensive farming greatly contributes to pollution, global warming, pandemics and other problems.

Many artists today are also exploring animals from a different perspective. Hanien Conradie’s (South Africa) yellow and red ochre and chalk paintings on black slate give us a glimpse into the wildlife of Towerland Wilderness in the Southern Cape, South Africa. Gustafsson and Haapoja’s(Finland / NYC) haunting installation “Waiting Room” takes up the entire ground floor of the gallery, confronting the viewer with the mortality of all beings. Kate Javens’ (NYC) powerful paintings show single animals that represent important social figures in the US, but at the same time express the power and dignity of strong individuals more generally. Hartmut Kiewert (Germany) is known for his utopian paintings of picnics shared by human and non-human animals, pointing to an (ideal) vegan future. Mass farming and animal food production companies crumble and are replaced by hopeful and paradisiacal scenes showing free animals and interspecies relationships between human and non-human animals. Maximilian Prüfer (Germany) works predominantly with insects and aims to dissolve the separation between man and animal. In this exhibition he presents works from the series “Naturantypies,” which focus on the behavioral patterns of ants and their collective intelligence – it is in fact the ants that trace an image on the paper. ROA (Belgium),who is best known as a muralist depicting animals all over the world, has created a set of new sculptures for this exhibition. Wade Schumann (NYC), who is also a well-known musician, stuns with his large, evocative colored drawings of wild animals. Vanessa von Zitzewitz’s (Germany, lives in Monte Carlo) amazing photographs of Arabian horses from the famous Al Shaqab’s stables in Doha include a portrait of Marwan Al Shaqab, the “highest ranked” stallion in the world, as well as an “underwater horse” seen swimming (von Zitzewitz used underwater photography) and another one “praying” – in all of them von Zitzewitz succeeds in capturing the horses powerful and graceful bodies and their unique, proud personalities. Janice Wright Cheney (Canada) explores the notion of rewilding and studies both flora and fauna in its original environment. Animals seem out of place on a gallery floor but make visitors contemplate their alienation from the wild.

While all these artists have very different approaches, their common ground is a deep respect for and appreciation of the animal world. Many of them seem to agree that it is time that we learn to listen to animals and develop interspecies relationships and communication beyond our domestic and domesticated animals. This exhibition wants to give a tiny glimpse into a world to be explored,the world of all non-human animals — beyond anthropocentrism.” – Motoro12

Gustafsson&Haapoja is a collaboration project since 2012. The project started out by exploring history and society from the perspective of other species and has progressed to dismantle the concepts of humans and animals and how they relate to the mechanisms of racism, sexism and social exclusion. In the works of Gustafsson&Haapoja, there is an idea of utopia and the possibility of a different world. Haapoja and Gustafsson combine poetry with a documentary approach in their work. Their art extends from installation and video art to performances, and their works often reveal the theatrical background of both artists. The artists attempt to link their exhibitions to social context through discussions, writings and actions.

WAITING ROOM @ SEINÄJOKI ART HALL 29.9.2021-8.1.2022

Exhibition master: Miika Vainionkulma / Exhibition assistant: Alan Bulfin / Art Curator: Sanna Karimäki-Nuutinen / Art Producer: Pii Anttila

The focus of the autumn exhibition at SEINÄJOEN TAIDEHALLI is on the pig. In the exhibition by the artist duo Gustafsson & Haapoja, the familiar animal is presented as a metaphor, a tool of production, and as a real creature living in the world. The Siat exhibition, consisting of an audio installation and video work, is displayed in the Hall exhibition space, where it is intertwined with the history and life of Itikanmäki before the art and cultural center. In the neighboring building, the Kalevan Navetta, which was then used for industrial and storage purposes, there was a slaughterhouse from the 1910s to the 1980s and later a meat processing plant.

This connection emphasizes the exhibition guidelines of Seinäjoen Taidehalli.

“We want to use our exhibition program to explore questions arising from the surrounding countryside and our location, combining them with current phenomena in contemporary art. This allows us to provide background for complex contemporary challenges and to highlight the significance and possibilities of art in society,” explains art curator Sanna Karimäki-Nuutinen.

Poetry and documentary meet
GUSTAFSSON & HAAPOJA has been a collaboration since 2012, in which visual artist Terike Haapoja and writer Laura Gustafsson combine poetry with a documentary approach.

“We started by examining history and society from the perspective of other species, and we have progressed to deconstructing the concepts of humans and animals and how they relate to mechanisms of racialization, sexism, and societal exclusion,” the artists explain.

The Siat exhibition features the audio installation ‘Waiting Room,’ in which the sounds of pigs living their last night are heard in the slaughterhouse waiting room. The artwork is exhibited for the first time in Finland, previously having been presented once at the Zone2Source gallery in Amsterdam. Additionally, a completely new, collage-like video work is on display, embodying the typical idea of utopia and the possibility of a different world, characteristic of Gustafsson & Haapoja’s works.

“In the new work created for the Seinäjoen Taidehalli exhibition, we examine the industrial society’s and culture’s practice of intensive animal farming as if it were the past. We have wanted to examine embodiment, the relationship to nature, land use, climate change, and the mechanisms of violence through the meanings and structures associated with pigs.”

The exhibition on display in the Halli Exhibition Space shows the overlap of history and life of Itikka neighbourhood. From 1914 to the 1980s, next to the Kalevan Navetta building, which at the time was used for industrial and warehousing purposes, a slaughterhouse and a meat processing plant were operating. In its exhibition program, Art Hall Seinäjoki explores issues arising from its location at the intersections of urban and rural, history and the future, combining them with current contemporary art phenomena. The aim is to set aside the complex challenges of today and to highlight the importance and potential of art in society. WAITING ROOM exhibition was visited by 5,177 people, which is a record number of visitors to the Seinäjoki Art Hall

WAITING ROOM @ ZONE2SOURCE, AMSTERDAM 7.9-10.11.2019

Waiting Room is a 16 channel sound installation presenting in 1:1 scale the sound ambience of the waiting room of a slaughter house where pigs wait overnight before the inevitable. Placed in the beautiful glass pavilion of Zone2Soure in Amstelpark, it activates a double exposure between the serene artificial representation of nature outside and the disturbing yet invisible acoustic landscape of the beings captured in the animal-industrial complex.

In the back room is a short video work that we call the Terror Archive – an archive of material that takes the words terror and terrorism as a starting point. In the next two years before our next scheduled show of this work, we will build this archive in collaboration with invited scholars and activists, exploring the mechanisms through which bodies (of all species) are made killable and how challenging systemic, normalised forms of oppression and violence are deemed terrorism, among other things. Can animality itself be considered a state of exception, in which “everything is possible”? What and where are the openings towards freedom beyond this logic?