Peer-to-Peer Review, HIAP’s collegial format, continues its peregrinations through galleries and other spaces throughout Helsinki. On Monday, February 27, the Peer-to-Peer Review will take place at MUU Gallery with presentations of two new artistic projects by HIAP artists-in-residence Eugenie Keefer Bell and Andrey Blokhin & Georgy Kuznetsov (Recycle Group) as well as Milja Viita, who is currently exhibiting at MUU. Among the invited commentators for this session, Timo Soppela, the director of MUU, will enliven the discussion.

A sense of place, or a memory of a particular place, often provides the impetus for Eugenie Keefer Bell’s work as a goldsmith and photographer. Recollections of travelling through Scandinavia and Japan in winter or spring, or the glittering brilliance of icy Canberra winter mornings provide springboards and rich sources. These encounters are drawn, deconstructed, combined with other traces of observation and making, and developed into objects and images imbued with recollection of their origins. Her studio work for the residency at HIAP will develop this notion of memory and place. Eugenie Keefer Bell is accompanied on the residency by her husband, Dr Robert Bell, Senior Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the National Gallery of Australia. He has a long involvement with Scandinavian design, and will be researching Finnish design and the work of Eliel Saarinen while at HIAP.

Andrey Blokhin & Georgy Kuznetsov (Recycle Group) are from the newest generation of young Russian artists. Recycle Group will present their new piece i-Faith, which they have created for an exhibition opening at the Cable Gallery on Wednesday, February 29. “We believe the Internet is an independent, transparent structure, and yet this very structure is one of today’s most effective authoritarian regimes. A regime as strong and deeply rooted as FAITH itself. Like faith it has its own religious postulates and ceremonial worship. It has its own idols and prophets, tax-collectors and Pharisees. The Internet has religionized the masses, made peoples walk in its faith and abide by its rules, as once they observed their customary faith, having no doubts about it, asking no questions, relying on it, believing it,” state the artists.

Milja Viita will present a recent three-channel video installation entitled Coriolis. It is a poetic documentary about identical twins that are separated by the world. One of the twins currently lives in Helsinki while the other remains in Togo, their native country. The twins come from a region where the great climatic forces, planetary winds, arise. The work was shot in 2011 in various locations, including the Gulf of Guinea in Africa, and Helsinki. The work is currently exhibited at MUU gallery.