Everyday Alchemy

Cinderella

2001

The opening part of this trilogy, Cinderel­la, is concerned with the birth and early years of a child, the change brought about in the family and in particular the role of the father in all this. It places especial empha­sis on the dignity of everyday life, the vital importance of the sometimes dirty and frequently overlooked chores that Cinderella has to carry out in order to get through each day.

“Alchemy is the attempt to produce gold. Everyday Alchemy (Arjen alkemiaa) is my attempt to raise small everyday moments to the value of gold”, says Jaana Partanen. Viikko-Savo, 9 January 2002

Cinderella is the story of a family, common to all and different for everyone. When the first child is born, the world changes. The child is a revolution that extends to the parents’ every cell and moment.

Ms. Partanen has used family album pictures as the image material of the Cinderella work set and added gilding to them. Gilding emphasizes the significance of each moment, the dignity of each person and the importance of each human relationship. The works underline the change of the concept of family and particularly that of the father’s role. Art history abounds with images of women nursing children, but men nursing children cannot be found.

Today it is no longer difficult to find pictures depicting fathers successfully looking after children in the same way as mothers.

In the works contained in the Cinderella section the photographic elements are restricted to people and are located against backgrounds fashioned from gold leaf or golden-colored beaten metal plates. The originals are as thick as gold sovereigns, ingots fashioned from ordinary pictures of ordinary events, for it is in pre­cisely this way, gilded and golden, that we are apt to remember those childhood years when once they are behind us.

Again, video installation

The video work Again, associated with the Cinderella series, had its beginning in September, 2001. At that time, the number one item of world news was the collapse of the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center. The game about the building and falling down of a town of blocks became real in a tragic way. News broadcasts kept resending the crumbling down of the towers, but why was just this video image so strongly engraved in our minds?

Golden City installation

Golden City is a large installation of gilded blocks, associated with the Cinderella set, which forms in the exhibition space an urban structure on a red base. The builder’s task is great and so valuable that in Golden City it can only be performed with white gloves on. The installation invites to try out and touch. Both little and big people can experience again the wonderful moment in which the block tower begins to collapse.

Crusade after rain

The exhibition is a playing adult’s comment to the crusade fervour swelling in the world.

How much money do we spend on the arms trade? Who has the war as their motive? What kind of global business starts after the bombs drop? Who benefits from the destruction? How about non-profit organizations and re-builders, don’t they benefit from the tragedy? What is the reach of these shockwaves?

The production is opened by a mind game: what if bombs would be good and unifying acts priced equally with these weapons? What kind of positive shockwaves and prosperity would this create?

Kaaba opened

What is hidden inside Kaaba? Why the different rules when it comes to wrapping it between men and women? Why religion finds it so important to leave women out of the higher ranks of society?

The holiest place in Islamic world is comprised of legos in this production. You can find this common material in almost every household and it gives an opportunity to explore the thematics thru the play of creative adult. Kaaba opened makes a statement on Iraq war and Islamic values and compares them to values of the western countries. These matters are still relevant in todays world.

Cinderella, theater performance

Cinderella is artist Jaana Partanen’s and audio artist Juha Valkeapää’s commissioned work for the Hämeenlinna Children’s And Youth Art Festival. Cinderella’s visual and spatial bases are Partanen’s works exploring Everyday Alchemy, installations formed of gilded everyday objects that Mr. Valkeapää uses in his performance.

Mr. Valkeapää’s two separate performances are formed of improvised dances with sound in which Valkeapää dances the brush dance, the billet dance, the mirror dance, the bean dance, the foam dance and the toe and heel cutting dance and sings the welcome rap. Cinderella’s prince does not for once fall into absolute despair. The sun shines on ashes!

A Real Princess

The third part, A Real Princess, delves into the relationship between a teenage girl and her middle-aged mother. This again is a question of change, giving something up and finding something new.

A Real Princess combines movement and stagnation, separation and staying still. Real Princess crystallizes the cross-pull between mother and daughter – pulling out, yet attached to each other – in one moment under water. It has toured the world’s photographic art exhibitions and festivals as far as Latin America and Africa.

Four mother-daughter couples participated in the making of Real Princess. Ms. Partanen discussed privately with the mothers and daughters and photographed after that their encounters in the water. Underwater the encounter of two close women parting from each other formed for a moment a peculiar relationship which it is useless to even try to imitate over ground. The mothers and daughters met with eyes closed, only with the sense of touched – and sought each other’s lap.

The moving still images are almost stagnant, but still enigmatically changing: sometimes the water in the background stirs, sometimes a fine strand of hair.

The sequence A Real Princess that brings the Everyday Alchemy trilogy to a close consists of a series of digitally processed photographs and videos in which the subjects and their backgrounds have been shot separately and combined at a later stage. It follows in the footsteps of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty except for the fact that their photographs printed from negatives and their gold and silver backgrounds have been replaced with digital files and they attain visible form only through the medium of a computer screen or projector. This produces digital images that are powerful and large in size but at the same time vulnerable.

A Real Princess, media artwork

2007

“Children grow apart from their parents and parents from their children. It is simultaneously fascinating, liberating and frightening.”

The Real Princess video work is a part of the series of works of the same title that as a whole forms the concluding part of Jaana Partanen’s Everyday Alchemy (Arjen alkemiaa) exhibition trilogy. Each of the independent parts of the trilogy, Cinderella (Tuhkimo, 2001), Sleeping Beauty (Ruusunen, 2004) and A Real Princess (Oikea Prinsessa, 2007) deals with the points of change in human life and the transformation of everyday things into something more significant than their appearance. In the turning points of life and as age accumulates, everybody changes into someone else, still preserving something same in one’s innermost.

Bubbles, video installation

2005, video installation

The Bubbles video installation was produced alongside A Real Princess. Its theme is connected with the tsunami accidents that occurred in Southeast Asia at the end of 2004. The tsunami caused by a submarine earthquake claimed thousands of human lives. Video techniques are used to combine a huge expanse of gently swelling, beautiful blue water with a small screen on which the same water is seen in a threatening blood-red color.

– Tragic things happen, and we have to live with them. After the tsunami I stopped to think who helps whom in such a situation. Underwater man acts guided by his basic instincts. When time ends, we concentrate on the most essential, says Jaana Partanen.

A Real Princess, document

2007, 3 min 37 s

The musical documentary, “A Real Princess”, illustrates the production of the complete “A Real Princess” under and on the water, in imaginary and everyday states through the use of captions / music / and visual effects.

Everyday Alchemy publication

The photographer Jaana Partanen’s trilogy Everyday Alchemy, produced during the years 2000-2006, confers a gold and silver tinged value and significance on the various stages in human life. The commentary by Riitta Raatikainen explains the background to these parts of the trilogy and goes more deeply into Jaana Partanen’s art.

Arjen alkemiaa – Everyday Alchemy, Maahenki, 2007.

ISBN 978-952-5328-99-8
Binded, 104 p., Size 27 x 22 cm, four-color painting, hard covers
Languages: Finnish and English
Price 25.00 € (VAT 0%) + shipping costs

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