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Rauma Triennale 2019 – In Praise of Boredom has come to its end. A warm, heartfelt thank you to our artists, collaborators, funders and visitors – to each and everyone who helped make the summer extra special.

The second edition of Rauma Triennale takes place in summer 2022.

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““Remember me”, whispers the dust. And one hears in this that if we learn about ourselves from time, perhaps time, in turn, may learn something from us. What would that be? That inferior in significance, we best it in sensitivity.⁠”

Photo by Titus Verhe

“Before the Internet, you would just sit in an armchair with a book open on your lap, staring into space or staring at a decorative broom on the wall—kind of shifting back and forth between those two modes of being”, writes Emma Rathbone. An empty spot, somewhere between the eyes and a wall, or a detail that contained the whole world, would be enough to keep you entertained for hours. Lounging, lazing and idling around the house and hanging around outside were legitimate pastimes for spending moments not filled with responsibilities.

The world described by Rathbone takes me back to my childhood, to the mood of holidays and weekends back then. To those moments when you watched a beam of light, shaped like a distorted window, float across the wall, and the soundscape was dominated by the ticking of a clock. I grew up in a completely ordinary world, and my everyday life was completely ordinary. The houses were ordinary, the school was ordinary, the town was an ordinary town of average size, with ordinary people living in an ordinary 1990s world. Time was something there was usually plenty of.

When we entered a computer classroom for the first time to compose emails to the person sitting next to us, it did not feel like the beginning of a new era. It was hard to come up with something to put in the message that you could not say out loud immediately, or at least during the next break time. Along with my first email address, the memory of those computer classes soon faded, but the Internet was here to stay, and started taking up a part of my time. 

Madonna sang ‘Time goes by, so slowly, for those who wait’ in a farewell to a world that was about to disappear, just months before the launch of the first iPhone. Time started to go by much faster and boredom was replaced by constant input: SMS, Messenger, WhatsApp… the list goes on. Nobody had to remember anything anymore, you just had to Google it. Boredom did not disappear. The New Boredom just turned out to take a different form. Now it means resting your eyes on quickly flowing characters or listening anxiously for the notification sound – now we have two new ways of existence to switch between.

The Internet has just turned 30, and touchscreen smartphones have existed for at least 12 years. What does boredom mean to the post-smartphone generation who have no recollection of those timeless times? Do they ever get bored?

Praise be to boredom, say the grown-ups. Or, as one of the students at Rauma’s Freinet School puts it: “Grown-ups usually think that boredom is good for you, but for children it is the end of the world.”

Adrian Bejan, a professor at Duke University, offers a scientific explanation for the different generations’ perceptions of boredom. Time seems to move faster for older people, as their brains gradually loses the ability to process signals. Younger brains, however, stay alert at all times and can process far more stimuli than mature brains. This means that a moment perceived as a welcome break by an adult can feel like an eternity for a child, an end of the world even.

During the spring term, students from Year 5 at the Freinet School in Rauma looked at the theme of boredom and found ways to express it in writing workshops. Based on their ideas, they recorded a radio play whose title roughly translates as Land of Boredom in an Era of Apathy. In the conversations the students have written for the characters, boredom becomes fatigue, laziness, sluggishness and lethargy. Everything to do with boredom has an air of tedium in this radio play.*

The Year 5 students began by creating their own characters, who live in the country of boredom. The characters include Swag-Pörrö, Bored Tiina, Slime and Seppo, who meet in Tiina’s room and the library, where the action takes place. To complement the script, the young radio-play makers have made a soundtrack with sounds of boredom, including music (such as Swag-Pörrö’s theme song and sad incidental music) and sounds created with Foley sound techniques, i.e. using different materials and a microphone to make sound effects (the ticking of the clock, books being eaten). They also took turns as sound recordists, capturing lines of dialogue and other audioscapes.

Repetition of the same routines and a lack of anything new leads to boredom, suggested French philosopher and author of the Critique of Everyday Life, Henri Lefebvre. After a long Internet browsing session, nothing really stands out from the endless flow of stimuli. An information overdose can be just as boring as an information deficit. Old-fashioned wall-staring at least gave you time to think, writes Evgeny Mozorov, quite unlike the deluge of information offered by the Internet. The flow of stimuli provokes an unrelenting desire to escape the experience of boredom with more information, and so it goes on.

The theme of information-bingeing is present in the radio play, in a manner that was only possible in the pre-Internet world: the bored characters try to suppress their boredom by bingeing on information in the forms that preceded the digital age: they start eating books and CDs.

For the young authors of the radio play, life without Internet really is a long-gone era of apathy: “An age with no mobile phones? RIP!”

ANNA-KAISA KOSKI
Curator (radio play and audience development), Rauma Triennale

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References:

Madonna: Hung up. From the album Confessions on a Dance Floor, 2005.
“Miksi lapsuuden kesät tuntuivat kestävän ikuisesti ja vanhemmiten päivät kiitävät ohi? Amerikkalais­professori keksi selityksen.” Helsingin Sanomat newspaper, 25/03/2019.
Mozorov, Evgeny: Only Disconnect. New Yorker, Issue: October 28, 2013. 

Rathbone, Emma: Before the Internet. New Yorker, Issue: June 26, 2017.

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‘Land of Boredom in an Era of Apathy’ radio play is created under the supervision of children’s writer and creative writing teacher Karoliina Suoniemi and sound artist Jukka Herva, and it is installed in one of the outdoor buildings in the museum courtyard.

Photo by Titus Verhe.

* The radio play is in Finnish.

It is 1991, and I am ten years old. It is summer. Summer means the village is empty, there are only dusty roads radiating heat, lined on either side with dry grass, and seemingly endless months of boredom. It feels as if I am all alone in the world, the air is still, and even the beach is too far away. I go out to the back garden, but there is nothing there. I lie down with the back of my head against the parched, yellow lawn. The sun moves in slow motion, the shadows of the apple trees slide across the ground, the clouds float motionless.

Twenty-eight years later, at a tram stop in Helsinki, it feels like time is dragging unbearably when I notice on the screen that tram number three will not come for another seven minutes. I take my phone out of my pocket. The worst of the boredom dissipates as the little glowing blue rectangle takes me wherever I want to go with its endless stream of images. I only become aware of my surroundings again when I hear the clattering of the rails and the doors of the tram car sliding open.

This transformation is what sparked the theme for the In Praise of Boredom exhibition: my own habit that has suddenly become so firmly rooted, my index finger too eager to reach for the screen of the phone. My patience and ability to defy boredom have shrunk to non-existent. But I can still remember a time when, after the last page of a book had been turned, and you were sitting on a train, there was nothing else to do except gaze out at the horizon, count the telephone poles and go through the thoughts that happened to be in your head. So, I have undergone a rapid transformation, almost unnoticed, perhaps irrevocable. Has this transformation taken away something I will one day miss?

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The English name of the exhibition, In Praise of Boredom, is borrowed from Joseph Brodsky’s essay of the same name, written for a graduation ceremony at the United States Dartmouth College. In his speech, Brodsky reveals to the graduating students that their future will be dogged by boredom: ‘anguish, ennui, tedium, doldrums, humdrum, the blahs, apathy, listlessness, stolidity, lethargy, languor, accidie’. According to Brodsky, boredom is inevitable, and just as inevitable are our attempts to escape it. Boredom feels pointless and trying to tolerate it is agonizing. So we do everything we can to avoid it: by moving house, changing TV channels, hobbies, jobs, even families. But Brodsky warns us it is futile to think you can escape boredom permanently. Sooner or later it will catch up with you.

Though Brodsky wrote his essay in 1989, even back then he perceives that the devices introduced by new technology are essentially tools for evading boredom. Their great number and easy availability are revealing. Their primary purpose is to hoodwink us with the pleasure they produce, and make us forget how much of our existence is unfilled time.

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Madame Bovary, the protagonist of Gustave Flaubert’s novel of the same name, is utterly bored by her mundane bourgeois lifestyle. Emma Bovary is frustrated by the mediocrity that surrounds her, the banality of the people in her life and the repressed emotions. Every day is just like the last, without the remotest chance of anything new ever happening. Since she was a child, Emma has felt drawn to dramatic elements. Stormy seas, tragic stories and fine words are her domain, and she has found these in popular romantic novels. But Emma finds herself the wife of a country doctor, in a small market town surrounded by bland scenery, and her everyday life offers room for neither euphoria nor fascination. ‘Charles’s conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and everyone’s ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or thought,’ is Emma’s damning description of her husband. It is very difficult for her to equate this love with the happiness promised by her romantic novels.

The mundane and insignificant details of provincial life —that so frustrate and propel Emma toward her eventual destruction— are described with the same enthusiasm and attention to detail as the dramatic emotions she longs for. In this way, the narrator reveals to the reader the very thing that Emma fails to grasp: the value of ordinary life. Nonetheless, it is hard not to relate to Madame Bovary’s character and her feelings.

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In another classic novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the characters experience similar ennui in a memorable manner. It is a scorching hot day in New York City in 1920s, and a group of young people travel from Long Island to Manhattan to kill time. They end up in the suite of a hotel to pass the time and have a few drinks. One of them explains how he loves New York on summer afternoons, when everyone else is away: “‘There’s something very sensuous about it — overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.’“ This is positively charged, privileged, anticipated boredom.

One form of tedium no longer a part of contemporary urban culture was once the hallmark of public holidays: on Midsummer’s eve, the streets of the city would be empty, and the lone soul left to wander the city would not find so much as a kiosk open. The stagnation and feeling of a state of exceptionality seemed to detach you from time and normal life. Philosopher Jean Baudrillard described the same state in an aphorism on French strike days, calling it ‘a moment of withdrawal, a moment of perfection’.

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The author and essayist Saul Bellow saw silence as a prerequisite of art, poetry and philosophy. A certain amount of peace and mental balance are required for their production. Since life in the digital age specialises in discarding silence, Bellow believed that art itself is being threatened. As a writer, he saw this as a personal challenge and, at the same time, a challenge that all artists and writers must be committed to meet: how do you overcome this noise?

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As a format, an exhibition is flexible in terms of time. The physical existence of many artworks does not bind them to a certain period of time and, even when it does, the viewer alone decides how long they spend in front of a single work of art, or at the exhibition as a whole. Besides their temporal length, works of art can suggest ponderousness by other means, too. Their form can communicate a long and technically laborious working process involving much repetition and patience, for example. Or their materials or contents can include references to slowness or long periods of time.

Some of the works in In Praise of Boredom are older, while others were produced specifically for the exhibition, but they are all connected to boredom in one way or another. With these works of art, and the exhibition that takes shape around them, we encourage exhibition guests to get in touch with boredom, to take a moment and tolerate the silence, tedium and repetition that causes them to feel bored. Perhaps there is power invested in apathy.

Maija Luutonen has completed two new installations for this exhibition; they will be placed on display at the Art Museum and the empty premises of Tarvontori shopping centre. In Luutonen’s work, different types of elements often come together, for example, paintings and sculptural elements made of different types of materials. There can be several such elements, and they can contradict each other. The viewer of the artwork must also get involved and try to build bridges for the elements that reach out in various directions, fill gaps and make conclusions. In this way, associative chains are created and thought processes initiated. In the diverse signals of Luutonen’s works, you can perceive a connection with the vast visual stream that is the Internet. In her new works, Luutonen approaches this endless flow of visual stimuli from another perspective: rather than merely reproduce it, she seeks to help us survive it and offer us a place of rest.

Martha Rosler’s video installation Semiotics of the Kitchen from 1975 is a work often described as a classic piece of contemporary feminist art. It portrays a woman wearing an apron in a kitchen, an everyday setting traditionally considered a female realm. The female character, played by Rosler herself, goes through the kitchen utensils placed in front of her and introduces them to the viewers in the style of an educational video, in a seemingly neutral, monotonous manner. As she does so, her gestures reveal the nuances, attitudes, frustration and aggression concealed behind the mundane setting, in which the woman is reduced and becomes one of the instruments she showcases.

Nabil Boutros uses the methods of documentary photography in his work. In this series of artworks, he captures everyday themes of life in his native Egypt and neighbouring Middle Eastern countries. The photographic series Ovine Condition (Celebrities) focuses on sheep. The exhibition features a sample series of 18 sheep from the complete series that portrays the whole flock. Each sheep was taken out of the flock and photographed in studio conditions against a black portrait backdrop. The series places herd mentality and individuality side by side in portraits which reveal the surprisingly unique features of every member of the flock.

Paulien Oltheten’s work also employs the methods of documentary recording. She moves about the urban space capturing small moments and events, taking photographs and video recordings, often reflecting subtle gestures and human relationships. The materials used in Oltheten’s artwork La Defense, featured in the exhibition, were recorded during her periods of residence in Paris and New York City. In these cities unfamiliar to her, she observed the daily routines of the local people. The events she detects are not dramatic or even unusual, but Oltheten’s sharp eye lucidly reveals their hidden meanings. You have to be alert to catch all the details that can appear so unimportant. These works manifest how the ability to travel detaches you from your daily surroundings and diffuses the cacophony caused by the must-do tasks that make up your everyday life. Your senses grow sharper when you are away.

Transferring from one place to another, travelling by train, car or boat are all favourable breeding grounds for boredom. When your only task is to await arrival at a destination, it feels as if time takes on a completely new form. The traveller occupies a twilight zone, stagnated to half their normal capacity. ‘Empty’ time like this is often a breeding ground for melancholy, too. Jaan Toomik’s video installation Dancing Home features the artist on the aft deck of a car ferry. The sea is the backdrop, cut in half by the backwash of the ferry. The steady roar of the car ferry’s engine is the background music for the serious-faced dancer, who tries to stay on his feet to the rolling rhythm of the ferry.

Sari Palosaari’s works will take on new shape during the months the exhibition will be open. The materials used for these artworks are stone boulders —but not just any boulders. These boulders are loaded with ‘snail dynamite’, a silent demolition agent that generates pressure as it expands and gradually causes the stone to split. The progress of this process occurs at an uncontrollable pace, and the only thing the viewer can do is wait for something to happen. Of Palosaari’s two works in the exhibition, the installation situated in the upstairs exhibition space, entitled Relation Shift, features an initial situation borrowed from Relatum (1971-2019, previously Language, 1971) by Lee Ufan, member of the Japanese group Mono-ha (‘School of Things’). Both Palosaari’s work and its predecessor approach the interconnection between nature and culture from the perspective of their own time. The temporal perspective of a rock meets the temporality of human action.

Emma Jääskeläinen also uses stone in her works. She works with granite and marble to create soft, organic forms. Even though the form of a marble sculpture does not have a minimum time for viewing, it can nevertheless express the idea of duration. In this way, the classical sculpture technique takes the mind back to classical times, and connects the work to the long timeline of art history. Using stone as the material, Jääskeläinen’s works elicit a reference to the timespan of granite, which seems eternal in juxtaposition to our human concept of time. The smooth surface of Jääskeläinen’s works also indicates a long working process, hour upon hour of work and commitment to a laborious working method.

Hertta Kiiski’s series of works was completed for this exhibition. The image on the small screen reproduces the same space in which it is located. Two girls, the artist’s daughter and her niece, who often appear in her photography and video installations, are spending time in the room depicted in the video. Surely there has never been anyone as bored in this world as ten-year-olds with absolutely nothing to do. The events of the film take you easily back to memories of childhood. In the second part of Kiiski’s work, rocks once again play a leading role. This time they are accompanied by the thin, rustling plastic bags familiar to anyone who has ever travelled in Eastern Europe. These ordinary materials step into the spotlight and communicate with each other. And, as is often the case in Kiiski’s works, these ordinary elements come together to create something important and exceptionally beautiful.

Elina Vainio has a series of works in the exhibition. Her drawings depict speculative spaces that take place at a future point in time which, though not exactly specified, looms on the horizon. The name of the series is Kohti maalämpöä (‘Towards Geothermal Heat’). It visualises a future scenario in which fossil energy sources have been exhausted. The work proposes underground spaces that rely on geothermal heat. The silent images are pencil drawings depicting lonely rooms that convey the feeling of time having stopped. Vainio’s works often create an impression of long periods of time. Sand, a recurring material in her installations, also suggests a broader notion of time than the human one.

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So, why would Joseph Brodsky dedicate his keynote speech to boredom? Because he saw that universities or, more broadly, our culture, fails to prepare us for boredom. According to Brodsky, we should not try to avoid boredom. We should face it head on and surrender to it. We should become immersed in it and let it crush us. Boredom deserves this kind of exploration, because it helps us to face the elements of time we usually seek to avoid. It reveals a pure, undiluted time for us, with all of its redundancy, monotony and triviality. Boredom reveals to us the infinity of time and, in so doing, conveys to us the most important message of all: the understanding of how completely insignificant we are. My existence is restricted and everything I do is meaningless from the perspective of time. At the same time, apathy reveals to us that eternity is not particularly dynamic, it is not packed with emotion. And the more limited a thing, the more charged it is with life, feeling and compassion. ‘Passion is the privilege of the insignificant,’ writes Brodsky. We must seize this passion.

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In the early spring of 2019, I took up the habit of having a tab open on the browser window while I was working, showing a live stream from a swamp in Estonia. In the middle of the screen, there is a beaver dam with a stream behind it and, behind the stream, the open horizon. Nothing happens on the screen. There are no beavers. The wind slowly sways a tree branch on the top left-hand corner of the screen. Sometimes you can hear a bird singing. That’s it. The sun sets in the evening and in the morning it rises again. With my wireless Internet connection, on the small screen of my computer, through a browser window I can barely see behind the word processing window, this temporal perspective of sticks, hay and wind might help me revert to understanding my insignificance and the passion that goes with it.

Anna Vihma
Curator, In Praise of Boredom exhibition

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References:

Baudrillard, Jean: Cool Memories IV: 1995-2000, 2003. English translation: Chris Turner.
Bellow, Saul; There’s Simply Too Much to Think About, 2015.
Brodsky, Joseph: On Grief and Reason, 1995.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby, 1925.
Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary 1857. English translation: Eleanor Marx-Aveling.

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Image: Maija Luutonen, Still, 2019, textile, acrylic on paper, acrylic and ink on paper. Photo by Titus Verhe.

What is it like to be in a state of mind-numbing boredom? What kind of special features can be found in places that cause staring, boredom and standing stiffly still? In what kind of an environment will your eyes start to wander around the walls when walls are actually of no interest to you?

Is it possible to purposely produce in another person the experience of stopping, doing nothing and becoming bored? Can space design be used to consciously promote idleness? Is it possible to build a visual identity with no ambition to achieve anything, or with the ambition to achieve nothing? Can you carry out service design for boredom while feeling bored?

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The primary function of service design is to provide users with experiences and functional models, using the help of various affective touchpoints such as human contact, digital applications or route suggestions. Instead of creating physical objects, images or spaces, the job of a service designer is to create a functional model, a kind of choreography that guides the fulfillment of a need or completion of an everyday chore like going to the supermarket, so that this becomes an experience, and in many cases, grows more efficient. Good service design can make life smoother and contribute to great customer experiences. At the same time, service design can be perceived as manipulation of human actions and moods, and as a tool of industrial engineering.

When we addressed the subject of service design of boredom, we became aware of the need to be particularly careful about the representations of boredom and the starting points from which the spatial and visual elements of boredom are first approached. It is very easy to get carried away thinking about the outcomes of boredom. The actual phase of becoming bored —the one that feels frustrating and ambiguous and includes feelings of paralysis, loss of power and insignificance— is easily overcome by the positive effects of boredom, such as rediscovering the world and inspiration. However, it is just that avoidance of the mundane feeling of insignificance that keeps us from achieving the possibility of being bored in the first place.

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In September last year, we visited the Rauma Art Museum for a weekend. It was our first visit to the museum building and its surroundings. We were given instructions on how to turn off the alarm system. We were allowed to wander through the museum space and the outbuildings on our own and at our own pace. We peeked into basements. We took pictures of the gravel of the courtyard, the rooms with their visible layers of different eras, and the lights and shadows drawn by the low-lying sun.

A new exhibition was being built in the exhibition spaces. Their half-finished state and lack of furniture highlighted the delicacy of the facilities and the lovely mismatched appearance and casual nature of the rooms that represent different eras. Vinyl floor covers in different colours, strips of wood added later, walls intended to stand for a brief moment but left standing for years. We walked from one exhibition space to the next. We went in and out of doors. We found ourselves staring at the wooden wall of the building facing the museum. We examined the floor materials, the cracked concrete slabs, the surfaces that had been painted over several times, the corners, the gaps between structures and the building and wood joints.

We wondered how would it be possible to encourage such slow-paced exploration and illogical movement during the In Praise of Boredom exhibition. How to build exhibition furniture that seeks to produce, instead of successful, predetermined museum experiences, emotions and moments whose dullness and monotony will cause them to be overshadowed by other feelings? How could we slow down time without making a big deal out of this stagnation? We sat down to think about this.

Can an ordinary bench, built of raw board, become a piece of furniture that doesn’t feel it has the obligation to produce services to avoid boredom? Could we rely on the viewer’s independent ability to come to terms with insignificance even when it feels distressing?

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The benches at the In Praise of Boredom exhibition were built in cooperation with local youth at the City of Rauma’s workshop for young people. A big thank you to Ari Ruusuranta and all the young people who participated in the building of the benches.

Kaisa Karvinen and Tommi Vasko
The writers have created the visual design and exhibition architecture for Rauma Triennale 2019

The first Rauma Triennale invites its audience to explore boredom – a phenomenon seemingly to be avoided at all costs in our time, the stimulus-packed era of digitalisation and globalisation. What do we lose if we give up boredom? Does boredom hide something worth holding on to?

The name of the exhibition, In Praise of Boredom, is borrowed from Joseph Brodsky’s essay of the same name. Boredom is present in the works in a number of ways: as a laborious technique, slow-paced contents or an appearance that demands it be explored without hurry. The exhibition is hosted by Rauma Art Museum and Tarvontori, an abandoned shopping centre in the city of Rauma.

The exhibition showcases contemporary art from drawings to photography and from sculpture to video art, featuring works by Nabil Boutros (EG/FR), Emma Jääskeläinen (FI), Hertta Kiiski (FI), Maija Luutonen (FI), Paulien Oltheten (NL), Sari Palosaari (FI), Martha Rosler (US), Jaan Toomik (EE) and Elina Vainio (FI). It is curated by Anna Vihma.

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“As a format, an exhibition is flexible in terms of time. The physical existence of many artworks does not bind them to a certain period of time and, even when it does, the viewer alone decides how long they spend in front of a single work of art, or at the exhibition as a whole. Besides their temporal length, works of art can suggest ponderousness by other means, too. Their form can communicate a long and technically laborious working process involving much repetition and patience, for example. Or their materials or contents can include references to slowness or long periods of time.

Some of the works in In Praise of Boredom are older, while others were produced specifically for the exhibition, but they are all connected to boredom in one way or another. With these works of art, and the exhibition that takes shape around them, we encourage exhibition guests to get in touch with boredom, to take a moment and tolerate the silence, tedium and repetition that causes them to feel bored. Perhaps there is power invested in apathy.
”

NARRATOR: At the same time, at the library, a certain worm wakes up.

MAISA THE WORM: (Clock ticking) I’m tired and I feel weird. I’ve woken up on the library floor and I’ve been squished. I can barely move. I’m going to slither over to the book and eat it. (Strange noises)

NARRATOR: Somewhere else, Kalle the Earthworm has just woken up.

KALLE THE EARTHWORM: I don’t feel like getting up. Hungry. I wonder what time it is. Surely I haven’t overslept? Is this a school morning? Hot… if I open the window… no, too tired. My bed is all slimy. I should tidy up. Did I have homework? I could go to the library.

NARRATOR: Soon, Kalle the Earthworm  is also lying on the library floor  eating a book. (Eating sounds)

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The above extract is taken from a radio play created by students from Year 5 at the Freinet School in Rauma. During the spring term, they have looked at the theme of boredom and found ways to express it in writing workshops, discussions, by drawing, and by creating soundscapes of boredom. Based on their ideas, they then recorded a radio play whose title roughly translates as Land of Boredom in an Era of Apathy.

The starting point of the radio play is a world without the internet. It takes place in the Land of Boredom where a group of characters, including Swag-Pörrö, Bored Tiina, Slime and Seppo live. In the conversations the students have written for the characters, boredom becomes fatigue, laziness, sluggishness and lethargy.

To complement the script, the young radio-play makers have made a soundtrack with sounds of boredom, including music and sounds created with Foley sound techniques. They also took turns as sound recordists, capturing lines of dialogue and other audioscapes.

The radio play is created under the supervision of children’s writer and creative writing teacher Karoliina Suoniemi and sound artist Jukka Herva. It is curated by Anna-Kaisa Koski.

Land of Boredom in an Era of Apathy premieres on Radio Ramona (93,3 MHz, 97,3 MHz or online) on Tuesday, June 4, after the 6pm news. It plays all summer at Rauma Art Museum as part of the Triennale.

The language of the radio play is Finnish.

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“The Internet has just turned 30, and touchscreen smartphones have existed for at least 12 years. What does boredom mean to the post-smartphone generation who have no recollection of those timeless times? Do they ever get bored?”

The first Rauma Triennial, to be held this summer, will challenge you to consider the value of boredom – a phenomenon seemingly to be avoided at all costs in our time, the stimulus-packed era of digitalisation and globalisation. What do we lose if we give up boredom? Does boredom hide something worth holding on to?

Rauma Triennial 2019 – In Praise of Boredom consists of a thematic exhibition, a radio play produced in cooperation with a group of local schoolchildren, and a programme running in the exhibition months.

The exhibition is hosted by the Rauma Art Museum, but it also spills out to the public sphere, and boredom is present in the works in a number of ways: as a laborious technique, slow-paced contents or an appearance that demands it be explored without hurry. The works invite you to linger. They remind you that while boredom is tedious, dull and dreary, it also entails rest, lounging about and concentration.

A local group of schoolchildren has been invited to take part in the Triennial which will produce a radio play under the supervision of children’s writer and creative writing teacher Karoliina Suoniemi and sound artist Jukka Herva. The starting point of the radio play is a world without the internet. It explores the questions of time, how it is passed and spent, boredom and presence.

The exhibition showcases contemporary art from drawings to photography and from sculpture to video art. Artists featured in the exhibition include Nabil Boutros (EG/FR), Emma Jääskeläinen, Hertta Kiiski, Maija Luutonen, Paulien Oltheten (NL), Sari Palosaari, Martha Rosler (US), Jaan Toomik (EE) and Elina Vainio. The 2019 Triennial is curated by Anna Vihma and Anna-Kaisa Koski.

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Rauma Triennale dates back to the Rauma Biennale Balticum, highlighting contemporary art around the Baltic Sea, that was run by the Rauma Art Museum from 1977 to 2016 and established itself as one of the most important contemporary art events in the region. The Rauma Art Museum is located in the wooden old town of Rauma, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Rauma Triennale 2019 – In Praise of Boredom will be open to public from 8 June to 15 September 2019. The Triennial is organised by Rauma Art Museum, and it receives funding from the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation, the City of Rauma and the Arts Promotion Centre Finland.

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