Annette Arlander: Pondering with Pines

Performing landscape is the overall theme for Annette Arlander’s artistic practice, which recently is focused on vegetation, especially trees, and often involves site-specific work, performances for camera, recorded speech, video installations and various experiments concerning the environment. Arlander’s works take place in the border zone between performance art, media art and environmental art. The main concern of the project Pondering with Pines is how to develop ways of recognizing and engaging with the subjectivity of life forms such as trees, which we tend to consider as wholly ‘other’. How to develop acts of thinking, reflecting, pondering or speaking with trees, next to them or in some form of collaboration with them. How to consider historical, cultural, material and local aspects when encountering specific trees. How to develop imaginative and poetic ways of encountering pine trees and engaging with them. One of the starting points is the practice of performing for the camera with trees and of addressing them. Annette Kristina Arlander, born 1956 in Helsinki, is an artist, researcher, and a pedagogue, and one of the pioneers of Finnish performance art and a trailblazer of artistic research. She graduated from the department of directing at the Theatre Academy in 1981, as Doctor of Arts (Theatre and Drama) in 1999. She was professor of performance art and theory at Theatre Academy 2001-2013, professor of artistic research at University of the Arts Helsinki 2015-16 and professor in performance, art and theory at Stockholm University of the Arts 2018-2019. She received the AVEK, Media Art Prize in 2014, and the State Prize for Multidisciplinary art in 2018. Her video works are included in the collections of the HAM Helsinki Art Museum and the Finnish State Art Collection.