Töölö Sports Hall – Kisahalli, as a facility holds a unique place in the Helsinki, national contexts, it’s 1930s architecture lays testimony to sports legacies that include the most elite of athletic performance - the 1952 Olympics, to the most mundane in its enthusiastic usage for an astonishing number of activities and events by ordinary everyday people of Helsinki.
Kisahalli never fails to be striking to me in it’s endless permutations of presentations of how it is utilized by it’s numerous user groups and idiosyncratic lone figures. Ranging from the very young gymnasts, seniors playing table tennis, young dynamic basket ball players, dancers or urban, African, Latin American, Finnish tango and emerging TikTok inspired cheoreographies, to the deadly serious and deeply committed weight lifters. Fencers, ju jitsu grapplers, and wheel chair using dancers, it suggests a space in which both deeply etched and new pathways can and are drawn. On any period of the day visiting Kisahalli one will witness the heightened energy of the bewildering array of distinct and diverse user groups and individuals navigating their own distinct and various engagements of use across and through the configurations of areas; users representing wide ranges of generations, ethnicities, mobilities and disabilities, pedagogies, and recreational pursuits of health, wellness, education and culture. It is as much shaped by it’s users as it is by the city.
For well over a decade my art practice has overlapped with those of sports and martial arts. I have been an avid user of Kisahalli since my arrival in Finland in 2016, using it for weight training, martial arts and yogic practices. Increasingly is has become a site for my own artistic research and development and as an extension of a studio practice where my activities in the weights rooms interface with those of my artistic enquires.
I would like to begin dialogues towards using Kisahali as both site and inspiration for a series of artworks by several artists, including myself. In order to realise this, I hope to convene a creative team of collaborators of artist/co-curator, curator, producer, from which the larger vision can be created and realized of the exhibition of a selection of commissioned artists’ works. Ideally all the artworks would involve working with the users of Kisahali, the indiviuals and groups who create it’s dynamic and vibrant space.
The works will be reflective of the complexity and richness of the Kisahalli context, celebratory on one hand but also cultivating what is ambiguous and nuanced in our appreciation of sports legacies and possibilities. The heights of athletic training and performance for Olympic and other elite sporting contests invite enormous risk and sacrifice in comparison with that of other users - the every day users – ones no less significant, perhaps even no less invested but operating according on and with vastly difference platforms, lenses and expectations.
Kisahalli is due to be extensively renovated (the timeline of which is being rescheduled in light of the covid-19 pandemic). In response to this moment existing between the past, this present and it’s ‘renovated’ future, this project will to develop the first stage of a longer term vision to curate a series of artists commissions and an exhibition strategy that responds to this unique and remarkable social, cultural and historical context.
