Thursday, April 3,4–6 pm,Finnish Museum of Photography

Peer-to-Peer is a platform for current HIAP resident artists and curators to present their ongoing projects to a peer-group audience in an intimate, informal setting. The events are open for public, and local artists, curators and other art professionals are sometimes asked to moderate or offer commentary to liven up the discussion.

The next Peer-to-Peer features artist Sylvia Grace Borda and curator Laura McLean, and will be on Thursday, April 3 at 4–6 pm in the Finnish Museum of Photography.

Sylvia Grace Borda has been producing socially engaged and contemporary artwork for over a decade. She works in photography, video and emergent technologies to study, research, and respond to changing urban and rural landscapes. Much of her work consists of carefully composed images varying from stereo-works to multi-dimensional tableaux produced in Google Streetview.

Her work borrows from painting and historical photographic vocabularies in which she pays homage to specific historical references. While using art history as a foundation to inform her production, Borda collaborates with communities to accurately produce narratives that become contemporary portraits of our time and provide reflections on wider social conditions.

Taking part in the five-year HIAP project Frontiers in Retreat, Sylvia Grace Borda is currently producing Farm Tableaux, a body of work offering intimate insights into Finland’s agricultural resources and peoples. Her portrayals of farming reach far beyond the romantic notions viewers might hold ranging from new perspectives on Lapland to intensive farming or green house production.

Laura McLean‘s curatorial practice is highly research based and she has built a strong body of work and line of enquiry into the ontological and geo-political repercussions of the anthropocene era and their implications for contemporary art. She is interested in researching how specific and real geological phenomena precipitated by human activity correspond to processes engaged by contemporary artists in their work. McLean is also interested in the tactics employed by artists to negotiate or negate the commodity status of the art object in response to these shifting ideologies.

Laura McLean is the first resident in 2014 of the HICP Helsinki International Curatorial Programme, co-organised by HIAP and Frame Visual Art Finland. During her HICP residency in Helsinki, McLean continues the finishing work on her most recent project, the Contingent Movements Archive, which considers the social, cultural, material, political, and technological repercussions of the erosion and dissipation of the island objects of the Maldives into the sea.

Peer-to-Peer with Sylvia Grace Borda and Laura McLean will take place in the main exhibition space of the Finnish Museum of Photography on Thursday, April 3 at 4–6 pm.

Welcome!