Where there were no longer walls: globalization, nostalgia, and art in Finland.

Abstract

While most of the literature on art and globalization theorizes globalization in terms of its effects on art institutions and markets, I focus on the way in which artists, artworks, and institutions produce the time-space narratives of globalization rather than simply reflect them. I conceptualize globalization as a hegemonic way of articulating the relationships between time, space, and identity in the contemporary moment. As such, it comes into direct conflict with nationalism, which served as the dominant template for creating such narratives during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nostalgia, a longing for a past time or lost place, plays a significant, though largely unnoticed, role in negotiating these shifting discourses of identity. As it is an aestheticization of the relationships between time and space, nostalgia is a powerful cultural tool with which to rework the relationships of the individual to the social, the local to the global, and the past to the present.

Each chapter examines a broadly defined site of time-space narrative production, using artworks by artists working in Finland or in nearby Vyborg, Russia or Tallinn, Estonia. I discuss work by the following artists, filmmakers, and photographers: Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Elina Brotherus, Tellervo Kalleinen, Oskar Kochta-Kalleinen, Esko Männikkö, Petri Nuutinen, Anu Pennanen, Minna Rainio, Liisa Roberts, Kari Soinio, and Pekka Turunen. I also address institutional phenomena such as the Helsinki School, the Finnish Fund for Art Exchange, and the international biennial system.