Due to safety regulations, the content of the exhibition will be also available online. You can follow us on instagram and facebook for our interactive program.
Ali Akbar Mehta: Is there a room with just a colour?
Avajaiset/Vernissage 16 April from 18:00 to 20:00
16 April – 9 May 2020 Myymälä2 is pleased to announce ‘Is there a room with just a colour?’ an exhibition by Ali Akbar Mehta that invites online and on-site audiences to participate and become co-creators of a living archive that represents colours of violence.
The exhibition opens with the launch of the website www.256millioncoloursofviolence.com. Online participation will remain open 24X7 after the website launch on Thursday, April 16, 2020, at 18:00.
Participate online at www.256millioncoloursofviolence.com
OPENING PROGRAM
18:00 – Introduction by Timo Tuhkanen and Egle Oddo, directors of Myymälä2, Helsinki
18:15 – Launch of the website
Poetry Reading: Invisible Lines (of Control)
19:15 – Ali Akbar Mehta in conversation with Camelo Ramiro, followed by online Q&A
The opening will be streamed LIVE on https://www.instagram.com/256millioncoloursofviolence/
AND on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yfn8pZdgu0
The work of Ali Akbar Mehta provides an unparalleled glimpse into the complex cosmological relationship of ourselves as both victim and perpetrator of the violence and trauma surrounding us. Based on four years of research, this new exhibition will focus on the culmination of a new archive, compiling the variegated aspects of our identities that are daily scrutinized, questioned and thrown back to us as everyday confrontations. In a world mediated by technology, identities may be re-forged only by challenging this mediation through both online and offline tools. Is there a room with just a colour? unfolds a poetic experience of violence and colour through a multimedia installation and a reading room.
By transforming the commonplace ‘survey questionnaire’ into a diverse communication interface, the project subverts the problematic usage of questionnaires as bureaucratic tools for data collection. With particular emphasis on questions of gender, sexuality, class, and citizenship, it reveals the presence of violence – in routine everyday questions, and in everyday life.
Through 50 questions gathered from various bureaucratic forms, the project facilitates an ‘encounter of equals’ and serves as a witness, a therapist, and a mirror, creating a new vocabulary of colour in the context of violence.
Ali Akbar Mehta (b.1983, Mumbai) is a Transmedia artist. Through a research-based practice, he creates immersive cyber archives to explore narratives of violence, conflict, and trauma within the fictions of history, memory, and identity. He is a founder member and current Artistic Director of Museum of Impossible Forms, Helsinki, a board member of Kiila ry, and pursuing his Doctoral Research in the Contemporary Art Department at Aalto University, Helsinki. He holds a BFA in Drawing & Painting from the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, and an MA in Visual Culture, Curating, and Contemporary Art from Aalto University, Helsinki.