PINK TWINS 30.11.2024 – 22.12.2024

Pink Twins – From a landscape of destruction to one that has been destroyed and constructed

The Pink Twins’ exhibition continues the theme of unravelling the landscape and spatiality that the duo, Juha and Vesa Vehviläinen, have carried on in their productions over the past decade. The duo’s ‘chaos animations’ have always tried to find unfamiliarity in familiar images. Their 3D animations are prone to fierce glitches as they swirl kaleidoscopically, which can be hypnotic or hallucinatory, depending on the perspective.

The exhibition’s main work, Firewalk (2024), continues in a vein that was already present in Overlook (2016), inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s Shining (1980): the video installations have references to cult classics of film and television. An early version of Firewalk was seen in 2021 at the joint concert by the Pink Twins and the UMO Jazz Orchestra, which took a plunge into the sinister-sweet world of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks TV series. The connection to Lynch’s imagery is also easy to make since the third season of Twin Peaks, released in 2017, resembles media art in places, and some of the scenes would work well as video installations.

Like Agent Cooper, who arrives in the small town of Twin Peaks, viewers of Firewalk first encounter Douglas firs, but soon a menacing glow of fire and thick black smoke rise from behind the trees. The fire and the forest are a portal to another reality. The work takes viewers through the arches of the branches to a level where the animation strips off the shades of gold, magenta and green. The black-and-white, reduced view of the same plants breaks the immersive spell and takes us back to the sketch-like nature of the drawing board and falsework of animation. What appeared, for a moment, to be an endless transcendental dive into Lynch-like mysticism is revealed to be a meta level that acknowledges its limitations: a trick that a magician chooses to reveal while performing it or, rather, the act of revealing it.

The other video work in the exhibition, the 45-minute silent Axis (2022), is a psychedelic and abstract road movie. The views come from summer scenery seen from a road, so deeply etched in the soulscape of Finnish people. It is difficult to stay on the right side of the road, though, as the views spiral in ever faster fans that create unstable 3D spaces. The pastel hues of the sunset and the wild clouds give way to a black centre that grows as the speed increases.

The Pink Twins exhibition also includes photographic prints of Chinese penjing arrangements, which are landscapes in miniature of forests and mountains made of stones and plants in containers. The series continues the themes of the video work The Eternal (2021), which reconstructed the artificial landscapes in traditional Chinese gardens. Penjing arrangements are part of these conventional gardens, forming a kind of mise-en-abyme: a built miniature landscape within an equally carefully constructed garden. The Pink Twins exhibition questions the ‘naturalness’ of a landscape but shows that calling this into question may result in supernatural mysticism and psychedelia being replaced by a less expressive awareness of the structure.

Tytti Rantanen, MA