Taidemaalariliitto

I imagine this garden.
I tried hard to remember this garden.
I hate gardening.
I dig bones and wash hands.

Sirkku Rosi’s exhibition Livia’s room is crisscrossing in images of plants, hair, continuity, circulatuin and decomposing. Both utopias and dystopias grow simultaneously in the works. Large aquarelle paintings ponder on the coexistence and intersectioning of different species in the world – shared flesh and cell. In the artworks the gardens are taken care of and spended time in, people exist as gardens. What do we want to save and what to cultivate for future generations while existence is so porous and the future so fragile?

In the Roman fresco from the times of Common Era, plants bloom and bear fruit at the same time. The garden of the Emperor’s mother and wife, Livia, is an underground hall where a woman exercised power in a painted wind. Wild birds have been portrayed in Livia’s garden, but there is a fence painted between place of a human and the nature.

Rosi’s works are persuading us to look at man as a part of nature, humanity as a part of the spectrum of animality. In the paintings, the skin is a leaking boundary between the human being and their environment. The connection is being sought, the connection is inescapable.

Sirkku Rosi mainly works with aquarelle paintings and performance art. She is interested in gardens – but not in gardening, the ritualism of everyday gestures and their absurd poetics. Rosi graduated from Aalto University in 2015 with a master’s degree, and her artworks are included in the State Art collection and collections of Tampere Art Museum. In her working Rosi examines the connection between corporeal and visual art, femininity, and the lived body and flesh as a shared experience. Rosi’s work conveys a restrained carnival of flesh.

English translation: Heini Mäenpää and Sirkku Rosi

Saturday 31.10. at 2 pm the themes of the exhibition are interpreted by Laura Jantunen (dance) and Juho Kanervo (cello), followed artist talk by artists Sirkku Rosi and Laura Jantunen and artist-curator Ramina Habibollah discussing (in finish) the connection between bodily and visual art and their reciprocal seepage.

The Arts Promotion Center Finland has supported arranging the exhibition. The exhibition has also been prepared at FIDA residence in Copenhagen, Villa Karo in Benin, Villa Lante in Rome and Kone’s home residence.