Masters of Arts Festival in Helsinki
Grown around The University of Art and Design Helsinki's juried degree show, the Masters of Arts Festival (May 10th-28th) is Finland's most extensive display of youthful design, film, photography, visual arts, and media arts.
Photo: MoA 2006
The three-week festival is spiced with a seminar series with thirty first-rate lecturers and numerous additional events to delight the audience. The young talents of Finnish visual culture demonstrate their unlimited know-how and passion toward their work at the festival.
The degree show features the vibrant visions of almost ninety freshly
graduated masters. Some of these future virtuosos renew Finnish design with novel concepts, some with material choices and manufacturing methods, and some refresh our views through the collision of cultures. This year many designers have focused on solutions for small spaces in an original fashion: if you so will, a table can be hoisted up on the wall as a piece of art or a wall can be moved to the ceiling!
The upcoming generation also brings up ethical questions about everyday life. For example, the Consumer Gadget phone service helps ethically and ecologically aware consumers to find out information about the product they're interested in. A number of works then raise the question of interaction between people separated by a physical distance. At the exhibition, one can get acquainted with a modern day confessional booth just as well as products that connect friends and family living away from one another.
Finnish photography has been a hot topic of discussion in the last ten
years in Finland and abroad. The Masters of Arts exhibition presents the new generation's cinematic photographs of estrangement alongside images that question the tradition of appearing in a photograph. Furthermore, the photographs ask, among other things, why we compulsively try to control our instincts and desires and why we don't react when we feel happy or sad. Is spontaneous behaviour wrong?
Photo: Tanja Bastamow, Case Light House
Led by the finest international lecturers, the seminars at the Masters of Arts Festival discuss in-between cultures, creative life and form in architecture. A voice is also given to the radical personalities in design from all over the world. Most of the seminars are in English. The home district of the University of Art and Design Helsinki, Arabianranta by the sea, is the hotbed of creative Finnish potential. The other educational institutes in the area will hold several concerts, performances and unpredictable events that promote well-being.
The Masters of Arts Festival is not a constructed experience, but a leap into a world that is shaped by societal questions, broad visions and grandiose ideas. More information can be found on the festival's homepages www.mastersofarts.fi.
Info on the featured works and the people behind them, the seminar schedule and the extra events will make it to the pages by the beginning of April.
Inquiries: [email protected]
Tuuli Sotamaa
Producer
tel. GSM +358 50 331 6727
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Anna-Maija Aalto
Communications Analyst
tel. +358 9 7563 0467, GSM 358 50 356 0751
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Outi Raatikainen
Head of Communications
tel. + 358 9 7563 0511, GSM +358 50 552 3135
[email protected]
The University of Art and Design Helsinki is an international university dedicated to design, audiovisual communication, art education and art. It is the largest university of its kind in Scandinavia and has a strong and active international presence. The University founded in 1871 is a pioneer in research and education.