Governors Island
Building 110, lower level
Free ferry from Battery Maritime Building
Sunday, July 31, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
www.govisland.com
www.ficultureny.org
governors island slideshow
Today is the last day to see the excellent exhibit “Bodies, Borders, Crossings: Photography and Video Art from Finland” on Governors Island before it goes on the road to other countries. Organized by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York and curated by Leena-Maija Rossi, professor of gender studies at the University of Helsinki, and artist and photographer Kari Soinio, the multimedia show is located in the dark, mysterious lower level of Room 110, with the videos and photographs glowing in Jesse Auersalo’s installation design. Featuring the work of eleven artists, the exhibition examines personal and cultural identity amid geographic, psychological, and physical boundaries. The centerpiece is Minna Rainio and Mark Roberts’s Eight Rooms, a circular eight-panel video in which an older lady goes from room to room, making the beds, throwing out the trash, and looking out the window, dreaming of a better life than the one in which she cleans up after men who have had their way with poor women who have become sex slaves through human trafficking. Riikka Kuoppala’s mesmerizing short film Visitor in My Body follows a young girl as she goes into the attic of the filmmaker’s memory, exploring a critical moment in her past. Childhood identity is also the subject of Marja Pirilä’s photographic series “I am” and Raakel Kuukka’s video triptych Childhood Rooms – Dreams and photograph “Rebekka at Muhniemi.” Minna Suoniemi’s Miss Kong consists of extreme close-ups of a woman’s body as she jumps rope, but since her figure is not quite what society generally considers beautiful and slender, it takes on added meaning. The exhibition also includes Jaakko Heikkilä’s photographs of minority communities, Elena Näsänen’s feminist ecological film Wasteland, Hannele Rantala’s “Blue Scarf” photo series of the same woman at various locations around the world, and Catarina Ryöppy’s “Being Misplaced” photos of two very different children.
There’s much more to see and do on Governors Island this summer. “Mark di Suvero at Governors Island” features several of the New York sculptor’s large-scale sculptures scattered around the area; you can immerse yourself in Victoria Vesna and James Gimzewski’s “Blue Morph” interactive multimedia butterfly installation, part of the New York Electronic Art Festival; Mary Mattingly’s “The Investigation, Constitution, and Formation of Flock House” details the construction of a unique urban environment; you can play fourteen holes of miniature golf as part of the annual Figment art presentation, which also includes a bunch of cool environmentally conscious works; “Intersections” consists of works by the Sculptors Guild; “Collage Logic” highlights mixed media pieces; you can fly through the air with the greatest of ease at the Big Apple Circus’s Trapeze School; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council is sponsoring open artist studios and building tours; galleryELL is presenting “Transient Landscape”: the Children’s Museum of Manhattan is hosting art workshops; Isabelle Garbani’s “Knit for Trees” creative reuse of plastic shopping bags; Cause Collective and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art have teamed up for “The Truth is I am you”; as well as upcoming live concerts, a Civil War weekend, a VW Traffic Jam, bocce, park ranger programs, and much, much more.