Taipei Biennial 2012

Adam Avikainen’s works—mainly installations that make use of various materials combined with his own writings—are like narratives that unfold between idiosyncratic observations and scientific findings, calculations and projective narratives, which are often told by objects or things. Avikainen thus draws us into scenarios that are based on both rational predictions and imaginary make-believe. What all his work has in common is that it re-scales human perception and self-perception in relation to both the micro- and macrocosmos of nature and geology, and situates our bodies and minds within the all-encompassing continuum of nature. Avikainen’s scenarios begin when “humanity” as we know it (as something beyond or in control of nature) ceases to exist. They raise awareness of the multiple other actors that define our fate—from the uncountable organisms such as bacteria that inhabit our bodies, to the large-scale processes of geology and the planet, in whose “body” we live just like the bacteria in our belly. Avikainen’s work reacquaints us with the alterity of life in our own bodies and environments. They bring us into close imaginative-sensory contact with that familiar strangeness of volcanic, mineral, vegetal, and mental realities and dimensions of life. 

The Ginger Glacier is a monstrous, quasi-mythic nonbeing that comes to us from a future geological age. It is pictured by Avikainen as a mutation of life growing out of all life’s symbiotic relationship to the sun. Not only do we owe our lives and all life on earth to the sun, but according to current scientific prediction this giant gas ball on fire will have completely obliterated the earth in about five billion years, while all oceans will have evaporated in one billion years, a time in which there will have been about twenty cataclysmic extinction events. Consequently, we humans have less than fifty million years to drastically alter our physical bodies to withstand extreme heat. The Ginger Glacier is a name for what will become of our human bodies as well as all other elemental and spiritual life: a collective body composed of anarchic cellular life living and growing in symbiotic relationships, a “frozen heat wave” that “dances with the sun.”

Adam Avikainen, born 1978 in USA, lives and works in Minnesota