RIR-foredrag: Sini Rinne-Kanto

Hugo Kalervo Palsa, born in post-war Finnish Lapland, often mentioned Edvard Munch as one of his major artistic influences. 

While set apart by distinct sociocultural backgrounds, decades, and geographies, the two Nordic artists chose to explore and develop an artistic probing of the human psyche, revealed to them in a harrowing but uncompromising unveiling of their inner selves. Both artists produced a vast amount of work across various themes and styles and were extremely dedicated, obsessional, and solitary while rejecting the prevailing artistic and societal status quo.

Munch was familiar with sickness and death since his early childhood, which left an enduring mark on his view of life and the oeuvre he later developed. The Arctic painter Palsa’s trials and tribulations were primarily connected to his surroundings and the constant feeling of being an outsider both in the artistic milieu of the era and the society at large. 

These experiences were transformed into dynamic sources of inspiration, leading to some of the most significant contributions to the Nordic visual arts of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The project stems from Rinne-Kanto’s long-term interest and research on Kalervo Palsa, which she carries out in collaboration with NY-based curator and writer Sabrina Tamar. 

From Lykkehuset to Getsemane seeks to establish connections, unexplored to this date, between the painterly motifs as seen in Palsa and Munch’s respective bodies of work. In parallel, the project brings the two artists into a broader 21st-century contemporary (art) context, providing a re-reading of their work in a moment marked by vast global socio-political unrest, with questions related to sexual politics, gender identity and mental health under increasing scrutiny.

Sini Rinne-Kanto is a Finnish, Paris-based curator, researcher and PhD candidate. 

Her research interests encompass interiors and domesticity, collective identities and feminist practices, sociocultural narratives and histories of modernism. She is a Co-Founder of The Community, and her recent curatorial projects include the group exhibitions Houses of Tove Jansson (Paris, 2023) and AllTogether (Paris and Venice, 2022). She is the guest curator of the 2024 Fiskars Village Art & Design Biennale’s Surprise Guest exhibition.