Jaakko Pallasvuo

Pallasvuo claims that "the most beautiful things are torn, revealing something underneath". Bringing together grunge music, Georges Bataille, the story of doubting Thomas and open-pit mining, Pallasvuo allows a glimpse into his obsession with holes. Online-sourced references accelerate in front of our eyes, pulling us deeper into the abyss.

Self-Accusation is partially based on Peter Handke's 1966 play of the same title. Handke's text is dramatized in a video within the video. In the frame narrative, the maker of the video receives a violent critique. The work deals with submission, living by the rules, and dreams of beauty and freedom.

Some Men Are Islands is divided into three parts. All parts deal with life events in and around the city of Turku, a town on the west coast of Finland. The first part is about a poorly attended exhibition opening. After the opening a work is burned on the parking lot behind the gallery. The second part is about being drunk and about ethics. The third part is about Utö, an island off the coast. The work is also about work, neurotically reflecting on its own form and means of production.

How To is a five-part series of instructional videos on how to make it in the art world. They provide a helpful breakdown of the field and steps to take to conquer it, including clear examples. How to turn being from the periphery or not being great with words into an asset? What about being queer? The videos give tips on standing out in the data flows of the internet, how to make craft cool and even on how to adopt a critical stance without making any enemies.

I have lost everything again. Again, I have nothing to lose. An unnamed woman breaks up with her extraterrestrial lover and runs away to Italy in search of new meaning. Seasons change while she repeats old familial conflicts, makes experimental video art and is haunted by the idea of eternal return. Will our lives recur in the same form infinitely, with no escape? Sacr3: Eternal Return is the final part in the Sacre trilogy by Anni Puolakka and Jaakko Pallasvuo.

Blending the old with the new, Pallasvuo assembles a mélange of voiceover, found footage, and digital graphics and software icons into a poetic, essay-like structure that contemplates the life and career of art house cinema legend Ingmar Bergman, along with the history of cinema and the mechanics of filmmaking, social media, and various other tropes. Bergmanproduces a saccharine and sentimental tone that feels both sincere and insincere, emblematic of the emotional ambiguity of modern digital culture.

Sacre 2: HEX is the second part of The Sacre Trilogy by Anni Puolakka and Jaakko Pallasvuo. The solemn cybergoth dance enthusiast introduced in the first part of the trilogy (Sacre, 2015) has graduated into a smug Wiccan vlogger. Her formerly know-it-all brother has fallen on hard times and now needs her help. Family relations entangle with work anxiety. Virtual and material survival tactics get tested. Spiritual, financial and social layers mesh in money-burning rituals. A damaged sibling dynamic is further destabilized by a seductive alien.

The Artist feels ambivalent about how it has all turned out, how what we see relates to what they had intended. We see: a beautiful mountain landscape and a man moving through it. He is playing the role of The Artist's future son investigating their death. More images follow, and The Artist tries to explain them, but is unsure of their relation to the proposed plot. They feel disconnected not only from the original ideas for the piece, but also from the situation of filming it. More alpine landscape, cartoonishly beautiful, it was all somehow supposed to be about love. The son/protagonist opens a fortune cookie while The Artist explains that they had found it randomly in a bank. Now we see The Artist drawing. They find the aspiration apparent in the drawings embarrassing. To desire, to want, is to make oneself vulnerable.

A cyber goth in her thirties makes dance videos at home, seeking freedom and the truth in a society obsessed with productivity and success. Her mode of living is persistently challenged by an older brother, whose caring and love come with a strive to transform her sister. The sibling drama takes a new turn upon the goth's encounter with a dance prodigy whose brilliance seems to leave everyone else in darkness. The film draws from the thoughts of the philosopher and activist Simone Weil (1909-1943), medievalism and cyberculture amongst other influences, viewing work, art and dance as war.

Performed by Matthew Underwood and Mikko Gaestel.

How quickly the footage of the empty art school takes on the eerie quality of ruins. A putty sculpture becomes the chipped-away head of a Greek medusa from a thousand years ago. Now medusa becomes myth. Art education is relegated to the ancient past—and is then juxtaposed with the future, figured in the stark Nordic architecture of a residency program that doubles as a start-up hub.

Mixing crude animation, 3D modeling, and faux filmic textures in a self-reflexive essay on digitally abetted nostalgia, this playful work of fair use pastiche refracts all manner of postmodern touchstones (David Foster Wallace, Talking Heads, Reality Bites) into an aesthetic interrogation of its own methodology, resulting in, to paraphrase one onscreen subject, a critique of a critique of a critique.

It’s 1967, 2015, 2515, 10000 AD. Simon and Garfunkel are travelling through time. Seeking an answer to their growing sadness and anxiety, brought on in part by climate change, they head to the coast, they are incarcerated, they visit a botanical garden… Above the tree line and into the Arctic Circle, they end up in Kilpisjärvi, the northwesternmost point of Finland, where they find themselves alone together.

Diamonds don't shine, they reflect.

He is dog-like. I'm into dog-ness in others.

A demonstration of two legs in knee high socks attempting to keep balance on some blocks of ice cream.

“A documentary about a morgue.” “Medieval sports.” “Chamber plays.” “Something with choirs.” These belong to a long list of projects the artist was going to make but never did.

Over a blue screen, a voiceover narrates The Artist’s experience of a sanatorium, where they were supposed to make a piece of art, but did not.

A communist and a capitalist recall their voyage into a wilderness of leisure time. A domestic cycle of breaking into houses, chasing the ghosts of parties past, and trying to conceive … but what? The waters ice over, ready to incubate. Something new is being born.

Looking back at footage of Venice Biennale 2011, The Artist remembers the optimistic feelings felt at the time, the projected careers, the romantic setting and how art meant something. The Finnish pavilion was closed when the footage was shot because of a fallen tree. Was it a sign? The sinking city echoes The Artist's current sense of resignation. The piece shifts from video footage into cartoons with speech bubbles, perhaps in an effort to reclaim the voiceover from a romanticising of ennui that seemed to be setting in. Is this a new beginning? Liberated from its ambitions for an illustrious career, art has now become a more metaphysical means of survival.