The swift unfolding of the viral pandemic has brought the hustle of life to a grinding halt, while social distancing is forcing us to spend more time with ourselves and pay closer attention to the subtle changes in everyday life. As the ancient Chinese saying goes: ”to investigate things is to attain knowledge”- through observing the ever-changing tide and flow of things, we can better understand our relationship within the world. The world to us is not a collection of objectified things, but a congregation of realities, facts of matter. Within the flow of matter, our cognition and sensibility are reconciled, revealing their inner glow.

Reaching beyond the visible phenomena, Tommi Grönlund and Petteri Nisunen have perceived, in their explorations, nature´s true intentions. Their inquiries do not stem out of surface manifestations, but out of genuine enthusiasm for the living world. Seemingly hard and fast logic of the world is all too often taken for granted, then reduced to a lifeless dataset. The two artists reverse this process. Through a variety of interdisciplinary tactics, they re-examine the sonic and visual flux of nature, its phenomena and transformations, to re-ignite our curiosity in the world, and raise our awareness of the consequences of our own behavior.

Grönlund-Nisunen´s architectural and kinetic installations are minimal yet poetic, restrained and precise in their expressive language, and rigorously rational. Instead of creating works that are emotionally “loud”, the artists´ speech is latent, leaving the audience enough space to discover and think for themselves.

A mere act of observing is enough to reveal the dramaturgy of the flux of things and its forces in this theater of slow morphoses. One should take their time to encounter, discover and meditate.

“Flow with Matter” is Grönlund-Nisunen´s first solo exhibition in China, and the first foreign exhibition in Shanghai after quarantine of Covid-19, with great support from Shanghai municipal government. The exhibition is also supported by Finnish Cultural Foundation and Arts Promotion Centre Finland. We have selected 22 pieces of the artists´ works to be presented in Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, http://minshengart.com/en. The exhibition will be open until middle of November.

Ma Nan, curator of the exhibition