Grace Ndiritu: PoriPostModern

The exhibition by British-Kenyan (Maasai Kikuyu) artist Grace Ndiritu takes over all the exhibition spaces of the Hall and Wing of the Art Museum.

The exhibition is a holistic view into Ndiritu’s artistic oeuvre consisting of artworks combining the spiritual and the political, museum practices such as collection-making and investigations into exhibition design and architecture as a type of spiritual technology.

Ndiritu’s exhibition is a “total artwork” that considers the museum as a ritual space. During the exhibition, the audience and museum staff moves around the exhibition spaces without shoes according to the artist’s instructions. The gesture of taking off shoes is recurrent in Ndiritu’s exhibitions. Its purpose is to enable an alternative way of interaction with art and the museum space.

For the PoriPostModern exhibition, Ndiritu has assembled two installations focusing on the museum’s collections. The Hall section of the art museum is built around Ndiritu’s work The Temple, which is an installation that functions both as modernist exhibition architecture and a spiritual communal space. The version to be built in the Pori Art Museum includes the artist’s own works and works selected from the museum’s collections. In the exhibition, postmodernism is not so much seen as a specific artistic period, but rather as an aesthetic or a societal stage that’s effects continue to this day. The exhibition architecture, Ndiritu’s textile works depicting historical political movements, and works taken from the museum’s collections together with other items resemble a kind of sculpture park built inside the exhibition space. In addition, Ndiritu curates a selection from the Maire Gullichsen Art Foundation collection which is central to Pori Art Museum’s collections. The modernist works from the collection are presented together with works on loan from the Villa Mairea Foundation in a special room designed by Ndiritu, is inspired by Aino and Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea which was built in 1939 for Maire Gullichsen and her family. 

The exhibition also includes the premier display of Ndiritu’s new film The Rehearsal, co-produced by Pori Art Museum. The film examines the massive collective grief we are currently experiencing due to our disappointment with politicians, religious leaders and bankers, and how we must create new kinds of communities and families to cope with this. In addition, Ndiritu has selected the film The Judson Church Horse Dance (2010) by American artist Mike Kelley (1954–2012), in which the artist sees a kind of artistic and thematic kinship. Together, the films deconstruct the concept of performance as ritual. Performance is ritual and vice versa, and in the exhibition the viewer interacts with the spaces activated by rituals.

The neon sculpture REPAIR AND RESTITUTION, installed in the sculpture yard of the art museum, brings together Ndiritu’s all-encompassing narrative, weaving together different historical periods and varied geographies, resulting in a re-evaluation of Pori Art Museum’s own history and its place in the world today.

The exhibition is supported by Finnish Heritage Agency.
Special thanks for the works on loan for Villa Mairea Foundation.
Original archival photograph: Satakunnan Kansa photo archive, Satakunta Museum.