The Outsider Art Festival has the pleasure to offer a residency for artists from abroad to work in Finland. This year’s guests are two artists from Sweden. Their names are Marianne Schmidt and Malin Karlsson.
They usually work as artists at the Inuti studio in Stockholm.
In art, Schmidt and Karlsson explore general and social structures through personal experiences. By using different techniques, including drawing, sculpture, film and language, they aim at understanding their own world, but also others’ mysteries. OAF curator Miika Turunen interviewed Marianne and Malin at Radio Helsinki’s Pertin Valinnat program.
How do you like being in Helsinki?
Marianne: “It’s great to be here. It’s a really nice city. We’re enjoying just walking around, working and discovering things.”
Tell us something about your project.
Malin: “I used to know Peter Viden (one of the underground artists from the 1960s) as a kid, in my early teens. When I grew up, I started thinking about “who is this guy really?” and that was the starting point.”
Marianne: “I didn’t know him as a teenager, so Malin introduced me to all of this. I’m making a film, starting with Peter Viden and his stories, with what he remembers and how he remembers what happened those days.”
Why are you interested in Finnish underground?
Malin: “It’s this genre where people try to find resistance and do things their own way, because there’s no other room to do it, so you have to do it yourself. I think that kind of movement is always around just in different shapes.”
Marianne: “They’re raising a lot of questions also about today, compared to Swedish culture today, which is very conformative. This kind of thing that happened in the 1960s/70s would never happen in Sweden today. So it’s interesting to know what happened in order to know why it doesn’t happen anymore. (In this underground movement) Not everything needed to be thought through or happen perfectly, it just was a lot of fun expressing, finding new ways and ideas, which is really inspiring.”
The works created during the residency period are presented during the festival. Marianne Schmidt’s movie is shown at all OAF Film Screenings. Malin Karlsson’s artwork is part of the group exhibition at Pertti’s Choice Gallery.
Listen to the full interview on Radio Helsinki.
More information on Marianne Schmidt and Malin Karlsson at their artist page.
