Artist talk: Hannimari Jokinen

ARTIST TALK: HANNIMARI JOKINEN 
Thursday, 15 June 2023, 7 pm 
Kunsthaus Hamburg 

Free admission. 

Hannimari Jokinen has developed the concept for the exhibition SPEAKING BACK – Decolonizing Nordic Narratives and is not only curator but also involved in the project as an artist. In conversation she will talk about her artistic, activist and curatorial work.

Jokinen deals with questions of post/coloniality. In the early noughties, she presented pieces on migration, followed by collective work-in-progress deconstructions of colonial monuments. At European and West African frontiers, she and her artist colleagues searched for vestiges of globalisation. In the installation Mirabilis L., that is shown at Kunsthaus Hamburg Jokinen examines the close connections between natural sciences and racial anthropology. She asks to what extent even today our knowledge and approach of the early modern era is shaped by mechanistic worldviews of the early modern era and the Cartesian division of soul or mind and body. Indeed, in botanical gardens colonial fragmentations of nature and in anthropological archives racist classifications of humans becomevisible and evident.

Hannimari Jokinen (*in Helsinki, Finland) is a visual artist, curator and author. She studied applied linguistics, culture management and cultural education in Zurich and Hamburg. Her artistic practice includes participatory and interventionist art projects in urban space, community art, film, photography, spatial installations, performative city tours on the subject of migration and coloniality. Jokinen researches, writes and teaches on the topic of urban space. In the past decade she has cooperated in projects in West Africa and on the European frontiers. Since 2003 she is a member of Working Group HAMBURG POSTKOLONIAL, in 2019–2022 she was active in the Advisory Board for the Decolonization of Hamburg at the Ministry of Culture and Media.