Production
ICELAND (Nighttime) explores the collective mindset of anxiety and hope in epic, post-catastrophic landscapes. The video engages the most fundamental of human experiences: love, hope, fear, solitude and togetherness. Set in Icelandic landscapes that are romantic yet inhospitable, ICELAND (Nighttime) deals with the sensibility that we are close to the end of the world as we know it.
The video resembles a nursery rhyme about different months, but within the poetic lines looms allusions to a planetary catastrophe. In a transformed world, resilient creatures like cockroaches, coyotes, and fungi are ready to take the stage.
LaBeouf, Rönkkö and Turner embark on a month-long project to hitchhike the internet, posting their coordinates online each day and waiting for a ride, with their path entirely in the hands of the public.
Set entirely against a green screen, performance artist Shia LaBeouf recites dialogue submitted by the graduating class of Fine Art BA, with each monologue presented with intense dramatic range in a captivating episodic, artistic format.
Following the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017, Shia LaBeouf and his artist friends launched a live stream art project called 'HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US' that ran for four years, the duration of Trump's presidential term. But what began as a spirited display of resistance against the divisive presidential election result quickly devolved into an internet meme. The live stream attracted attention from the darkest corners of 4CHAN, encouraging trolls who made it their life's mission to ruin Shia's art project.
Those Who Kept the Light is a project loosely based on stories of female lighthouse keepers in Scandinavia. The project explores our co-dependent relationship to the sea in context of queer and feminist maritime narratives. The narratives are often told through the voices and context of more-than human others, such as the wind, a prawn or a lighthouse. The sea, the wind, the ocean are seen as entities with consciousness and a voice. Within the wider framework of climate emergency and the role of the fragile ecosystems of the ocean, the project explores the collective mind-set of imagination, hope and imagined spaces of solace and power through and within epic and barren Nordic landscape.
Filmed in a barren fishing community off the Icelandic coast and a trendy hotel in Helsinki, A Seal Story is a queer take on a contemporary love triangle. It takes its inspiration from the legend, where seals were believed to be former human beings who voluntarily sought death in the ocean. Once a year, they were allowed to come on land, strip off their skins and amuse themselves as human beings.
Nastja Säde Rönkkö recites one poem with three narrators: a teardrop, a droplet of blood and a bead of sweat. Each tells love stories through biochemistry – about love, belonging and loss, and about crises lived and impending. The words are vivid but not enough, supercharged here by hyperreal images of landscapes both physical and emotional, and the fluids expressing and crystallising them.
A narrator from an undefined future discusses love, hope, future, beginnings, myths, environmental disasters and vanished species. The video investigates the possible end of an era, its entangled histories, open-ended narratives and flux identities. It aims to carefully glimpse into the possible futures of humankind and other kind: the vital necessity for co-dependence and urgency to remember, preserve and act now.
Majestic shots of Arctic glaciers are contrasted with a poem where the voice-over steadily instructs how to skin a polar bear, from head to paws, from a living, feeling being to a pile of commodities.
Guided by a voice of an old fox, the narrator describes a troubled relationship in an ambiguous domestic setting. The failings of contemporary society and the anxiety of a looming disaster can be sensed in the background. Thoughts about stardust and dark matter that bind together the entire universe offer glimpses of hope and solace.
In Above Our Horizon, we see the artist don a carnival mask of a bird’s head, whose exaggerated size and features hint at an uncanny reality being portrayed onscreen: a hybrid of our known and shared world and a dream world. It encompasses the sea, the air, which is crisscrossed by the flight of birds and bats and dotted with stars, a “sea salt whirlwind”, fire and a burned hill, as well as fish, which is grilled alive to provide sustenance.
X is wondering when a thing becomes a thing, and when some other thing becomes too much. X is to wonder how do you know if not by intuition, when peculiarity becomes overpowering or when danger becomes arousing or when violence escapes its sexy boundaries? The short film is part of Nastja Säde Rönkkö’s 26-part Survival Guide for the Post-Apocalyptic Child.
