Between Thingness and Being by Terike Haapoja Thursday, October 10, 2019 Host: Pinar Yoldas, Visual Arts Assistant Professor Guests: 50 Time: 5:00pm-7:00pm 5:00pm Calit2 Auditorium with Terike Haapoja and Pinar Yoldas 6:00pm Reception PFA and gallery open Gallery hours: October 10 - December 6, 2019, 12pm-5pm The event is free and open to the public. RSVP requested to galleryinfo@calit2.net. Statement: The exhibition Between Thingness and Being juxtaposes Terike Haapoja’s early media artwork with a new site-specific installation to examine the middle ground between objecthood and subjectivity, personhood and thingness. “Entropy” and “Mind over Matter over Mind” explore the thresholds of birth and death of an individual with the use of infrared and ultrasound technologies. Attempts to generate knowledge of these existential event horizons produce instead ritualistic images that allow us to be in relation with the unknown, while bringing forth questions regarding the materiality of these technologies as a means of knowledge production. The installation of these two works in the gallery space allow for a silent, nondiscursive meditation of these questions in a chapel-like setting. In the 15 years since the making of these works, Haapoja has built a complex body of work that uses large-scale, discursive installation media art projects and related publications to expand these core themes to include questions regarding our relationship with other species, the mechanics of othering, such as animalization, and the legal and political structures of making beings into things and things into beings. Her most recent work deals specifically with the body, law and biopolitical operations that regulate the boundary between beingness and thingness. On two 30-ft walls outside the gallery, a new work, “Persons and Things,” consisting of archival material and photography, looks at how the history of legal personhood always defines a negative space that is inhabited by “things.” By juxtaposing “Entropy” and “Mind Over Matter” in the gallery with the new work “Persons and Things” in the hallway, the exhibition Between Thingness and Being will bind together the artist’s long-term research into these fundamental ethical themes. Bio: Terike Haapoja is a visual artist based in New York. Haapoja’s large-scale installation work, writing and political projects investigate the mechanics of othering with a specific focus on issues arising from the anthropocentric world view of western modernism. The question of animality and the possibility of a community of difference are recurring themes in Haapoja’s work. Haapoja represented Finland in the 55 Venice Biennale with a solo show in the Nordic Pavilion, and her work has been awarded with several prizes, including the ANTI prize for Live Art (2016), the Dukaatti-prize (2008) and an Ars Fennica prize nomination. Haapoja’s collaboration with writer Laura Gustafsson was presented with a Finnish State Media art award (2016) and the Kiila-prize (2013). Haapoja is the co-editor of the publications The Helsinki Effect – Public Alternatives to Guggenheim’s Model of Culture Driven Development (Terreform UR 2016), Altern Ecologies – Emergent Perspectives on the Ecological Threshold in the 55 Venice Biennale (Frame 2015), History According to Cattle (punctum books 2015), and Field Notes – From Landscape to Laboratory (The Finish Bioart Society 2011), among others. Terike Haapoja has given talks and lectures internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, Documenta and Creative Time Summit, NYU, Queens College and SLSA. She is an adjunct professor at Parsons Fine Arts, New York.