PATRIK SÖDERLUND

 

Visual Artist | Finland

 

 

With backgrounds in visual arts and cultural studies, IC-98 (Patrik

Söderlund & Visa Suonpää, founded in 1998) has produced artist

publications, site and context specific projects and interventions,

animated moving image installations, short films and various public

commissions. IC-98 received the Finnish State Art Prize in 2009 and

represented Finland at the Venice Biennale in 2015.

Though their practice is essentially conceptual, IC-98 has been best

known for animations, which combine classical drawing and digital

effects, depicting landscapes shaped by long time durations, natural

and human histories and climate. Mythical, material, factual and fictional

elements are weaved together into visual stories, which – though deeply

political and meticulously researched, scripted and executed – are

presented as open-ended poetic narratives. The mood of the works

alternates between a sense of crisis, melancholy, acceptance and

resigned optimism.

IC-98’s work since 2010s addresses the environmental crisis and

artistic-political methods of finding solutions to it. The projects seek to

replace anthropocentric worldview with modes better suited to take into

consideration the interrelationships, dependencies and myriad temporal

rhythms of all animate and inanimate nature.

The animations Nekropolis (2016), Epokhe (2017) and Lands of

Treasure (2021), as well as the film Realms (2018), are allegorical

descriptions of time, climate, and how environmental and cultural

histories merge in different eras. On the other hand, the site-sensitive

projects House of Khronos (2016-), Mare tranquillitatis (2020), IÄI

(2020) and the ongoing Misi-Raaka Park of Wounded Earth (2019-)

have instead of mere artistic depiction sought to create tools – free

zones, novel languages, new founding myths – to help this community

of all organisms emerge from the crisis.