ANNA ESTARRIOLA | MOMENT
Serlachius Museum Gösta | 23 September 2023–3 March 2024

Press release 21 September 2023

Anna Estarriola stages a brief moment in the Serlachius Museums

Anna Estarriola’s installation transforms the exhibition space into an extended moment in a garden or a greenhouse. In a separate enclosure, like a carefully bred plant, a figure levitates or stands on its hair. On the ground, growling creatures await. Estarriola’s installation Moment opens at the Serlachius Museums in Finland on 23 September 2023.

Catalan born Anna Estarriola (b. 1980), who lives and works in Finland, is known for her uncannily enchanting sculptures and media installations. In her work, the artist combines sculpture, moving image, performance and sound to create affectively charged images, scenes and situations.

For how long is it possible for the figure to hold the gravity-defying pose? Simultaneously rising and about to collapse in its superhuman balancing act, the contorted body presents us with a vision pondering humanity’s yearning for the infinite and the not yet possible. What is the creatures’ role in the closed circuit? What happens next?

Estarriola’s art often explores encounters between human and non-human, the known and the unknown as well as animate and inanimate existence. Experimenting with different techniques and challenges is also a constant feature of her art. In Moment, the artist has created a garden of surreal delights populated with disturbingly detailed yet unreal simulations of beings. 

Through her work, Anna Estarriola reflects on the perception and categorisation of reality and on structures of communication and patterns of behaviour of organisms and environments. In Moment, Estarriola continues evolving the themes of performativity, otherness, power and failure as well as finiteness and eternity inherent in her previous work. 

The work juxtaposes artistic creation with the cycle of life and hints at the inevitable fall already present in the moment of glory. How much is it possible to control, alter and exceed nature and humanity before meeting their limits? 

Anna Estarriola graduated from Barcelona Fine Arts University in 2004 and received her master’s degree from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2009. Estarriola’s works have been widely displayed in solo and group exhibitions in Finland and internationally, and they feature in the collections of several art museums in Finland and abroad. Estarriola was awarded the AVEK Award in 2015 and a five-year state artist grant in 2019.

Press releases and photographs: https://serlachius.fi/en/for-media/

For further information and image requests, please contact: 
Susanna Yläjärvi, Information Officer of the Serlachius Museums, tel. +358 50 560 0156,  susanna.ylajarvi@serlachius.fi

The Serlachius Museums are open:
in the winter season, 1 September–31 May, from Tuesday to Sunday, 11 am–6 pm.
in the summer season, 1 June–31 August, every day 10 am-6 pm

Visiting addresses:
Serlachius Museum Gösta, Joenniementie 47, Mänttä
Serlachius Museum Gustaf, R. Erik Serlachiuksen katu 2, Mänttä

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