Northern Affinity

Northern Affinity- Artists from Lapland and Basque Country

‘Northern Affinity: Artists from Lapland and Basque Country’ is an art exhibition project introducing the work of six artists living/working in Lapland (Finland) and Basque Country (Spain).

The project aims at finding common ground in the culture being produced in Lapland and Basque Country today, through the works of the artists invited in the exhibition. Furthermore, ‘Northern Affinity’ offers an opportunity to examine, question and reconsider preconceived outmoded notions (clichés, stereotypes) about both places; unearth and revitalise real contemporary themes and stories belonging to one and the other; and bring forth a context for a dialogue between artists and institutions (universities, museums…) from the two regions. ‘Peripheries (North)’ is not concerned with art being made about Lapland and Basque Country, but from -being made today in- Lapland and Basque Country.

The exhibition, put together by Lapland based artist/curator Misha del Val (Bilbao, 1979) in conjunction with Lapin Taiteilijaseura – Artists’ Association of Lapland, features works of Basque artists Joseba Eskubi, Nadia Barkate and Zuhar Iruretagoiena, and artists from Lapland Jaakko Heikkilä, Raisa Raekallio and Sanna Haimila. The participation of all these artists in the project has been already confirmed. Galleria Napa and Studio Mustanapa, in Rovaniemi, are the appointed venues for the exhibition, which will take place in January 2021 (Korundi museum, in turn, has shown interest in a possibe collaboration, at this initial stage of the project exhibition). The project hopes to serve as an introductory platform for Basque artists in Lapland and vice versa. Its full scope is to present a twin exhibition in Lapland as well as in Basque Country. At present, Misha del Val continues conversations with institutions and galleries in Basque Country.

Lapland and Basque Country sit in Northern areas within the countries they belong to, holding ownership over the pathos of their respective (imagined) Norths; both regions house languages belonging to the only two non-Indo-European family languages exiting in Europe today: Basque (Euskera) and Finno-Ugric (Finnish and the Sámi languages), which share, amongst others, the common trait of using postpositions instead o prepositions, unlike other European languages; the character of its peoples has been carved in relative isolation through the ages, hence both territories exercise a certain magnetism for those seeking the ‘uncooked spirit’ of the land -this being especially true for Lapland. By placing next to each other the creations of the artists invited in the exhibition, we may examine how much -if at allthese shared traits are reflected and play a noticeable part in the art and culture being produced today in Northern Finland and Northern Spain.

’Northern Affinity: Artists from Lapland and Basque Country’ is structured around three pairs of artists -whose creations are juxtaposed according to considerations of form and/or content- working on the mediums of painting, sculpture, video, photography and drawing. Each pair includes artists from the two regions:
Joseba Eskubi (Bilbao) / Sanna Haimila (Tornio)
Jaakko Heikilä (Kemi) / Zuhar Iruretagoiena (Bilbao)
Nadia Barkate (San Sebastian/Donostia) / Raisa Raekallio (Kittilä)

Misha del Val is a visual artist and curator based in Kittilä, Finland. Del Val grew up in Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain, and completed his degree in Fine Arts at Basque Country University in 2003. Del Val lived and worked as an artist in Australia from 2003 to 2013, where he continued his studies at College of Fine Arts, University of NSW, in Sydney 2008-09. Since 2013, Misha lives and works in Sirkka, Kittilä, Finland.

Joseba Eskubi (Bilbao) / Sanna Haimila (Tornio)

Joseba Eskubi (Bilbao, 1967) is a lecturer in painting at Basque Country University and an internationally renowned Basque artist. In the last two years, his mysterious and suggestive paintings, collages and digital images have been part of exhibitions in London, San Petersburg, Munich, Madrid, Frankfurt and New York. His work, heavily indebted to the tradition of Western painting, from Goya and Chardin to Surrealism, often presents a single amorphous figure before a distant horizon. The creatures in Eskubi’s paintings seem to roam in an on-going, unsuccessful process of becoming something or someone definite.

Hanna Haimila (Porvo, 1974) is a Tornio-based artist. Her work has been exhibited in all the major galleries of Lapland and Northern Finland (Korundi Art Museum, Aine Art Museum, Oulu Art museum, Kemi Art museum). The artist produces figurative paintings and works on paper, which explore the experience of inhabiting a human body. In his recent series of works the gaze of the model is obliterated, as if the figure were collecting stimulus chiefly from within. Haimila abandons any endeavour for virtuosity, in search of a fundamental language of mark-making, that would enable the artist a more satistactory translation of a naked experience of being.

It would prove useless to seek in the work of Joseba Eskubi and Sanna Haimila any signs of affiliation to a particular national identity. Their paintings are, on the contrary, attempts to transcend the very notions of affiliation and subvert any hopes for fixed, static, permanent understanding. In their paintings -prevailing blurry contours, fleshy
appendages, forms on the verge of recognition and, ubiquitously, a sensual enjoyment of the material- there is a revelling in the uncertainty preceding identity and identification. Both artists work intuitively, using the mechanisms of painting and drawing to bring into presence an immaterial and transient world of sensations. In the oneiric scenes of Eskubi as in the works on plexiglass of Haimila nothing is settled; questions seem to hold more value than the promise of any possible answers.

Jaakko Heikilä / Zuhar Iruretagoiena

Jaakko Heikilä (Kemi 1956) has a wide practice as an artist photographer of over thirty years. He is one of the most acclaimed photographers in Lapland and in all of Finland. His work is represented in collections in Northern Finland (Aine Art Museum, Korundi Art Museum, Oulu Art Museum), nationally (Finnish State collections, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Finnish Photographic museum) and internationally (Contemporary Photography at the Neue Börse, Frankfurt/Main, The Town Hanau, Germany). His photographic and video work has introduced the peoples and scenes of his native Lapland to a wider world (for instance, in his 2017 series ‘Ballad of Lapland’), and has brought stories and insights about communities and minorities of people in different parts of the world home to Finland.

Zuhar Iruretagoiena, in addition to her independent artistic practice, holds a PhD in Art and Technology from Basque Country University, where she currently has a teaching position. Iruretagoiena belongs to a younger generation of artists working with the expanded notions of sculpture put forward by Jorge Oteiza (1908-2003), arguably the most influential Basque artist of the 20th century. These notions, involving ethics, social engagement and enquiry into the Basque condition, constituted the backbone of a generation of artists known as Nueva Escultura Vasca (New Basque Sculpture). Iruretagoiena works with sculpture, installation, photography and video. Her work is concerned with formal approaches to contemporary sculpture and addresses tensions and relationships of her being in the world as a woman, as an artist, and as a Basque person.

Iruretagoiena looks within. Heikkilä looks outwards. The Basque artist develops her intricate multimedia projects in the sheltered solitude of her studio, where she is able to fully face and properly understand herself. The Lappish photographer travels, offers a gaze of empathy, talks, lingers and brings back glimmers of understanding for the situations of others. In ‘Northern Affinity’ the work of these two artists will be presented side-by-side at Studio Mustanapa, a black-box room located in the basement of Galleria Napa, expressly designed to hold new media artistic work.

Nadia Barkate (San Sebastian/Donostia) / Raisa Raekallio (Kittilä)

Nadia Barkate was born in Bilbao and graduated in Fine Arts from Basque Country University in 2007. She currently lives and works in San Sebastian / Donostia, while completing her PhD studies also from Basque Country University. Barkate’s practice fluidly moves inter-media, from works in glass to video installations, from airbrush drawings to publication of fanzines and artist books. Finding the platform that most amuses the artist at the moment of creative itchiness, is an integral part of her art practice, for amusement, fun and play, coalesce with the fate of Barkate’s work to be delivered successfully. For ‘Northern Affinity’ the artist presents her on-going series of works in glass, developed alongside a master glass maker over the last two years.

Raisa Raekallio was born and raised in Kittilä. She graduated from Lahti
taideinstituutti in 2002, and spent over a decade in Helsinki working as an artist and an illustrator before returning to her native Lapland in 2013. Raekallio’s drawing practice, sitting next to a river bank or near the chimney at the end of the day once her duties as a mother are over, is her way to regain confidence, navigate and make sense of the world. Her abundant production of ink drawings is graced with a strange immediacy -as if endowed with the ability to hold the energy of the moment in which they were created. More significantly than what they figuratively represent, these modest works on paper draw us near to the spirit and mood from which they originated. In her own words ‘When I make these ink drawings I tap into a very intimate place within myself. I get closer and closer to something, which I don’t know what it is, but I know it is there. I am not concerned about how the drawing will look like. The core of my drawing process is to dwell in a place of honesty, where the work delivers itself.’ Whether.’

Whether by use of glass, ink or charcoal, Barkate and Raekallio produce artworks of uncompromising personal poetry, with autobiographical undertones, reminiscent of the work of French artist Louise Bourgeois. Barkate’s sensibility and her work’s mien –urban outlook, ironic titles, irreverent demeanours- have matured, at least in part, living in and through the Basque rock scene (she was the lead-singer of Bilbao rock band ‘Maha’ 2003-2010), while Raekallio owes much of hers to the boundless natural spaces of her native Sirkka village. Despite such different makeups, both artists seem to draw from the same fertile ground of the collective unconscious. The deeper they dig into it, without the slightest effort to please others but themselves, the closer their creations resonate with one another. And, by extension, with the observant viewer.

Misha del Val

More info ->