Core
Blind Spot Society III
Blind Spot Society V
Blind Spot Society VI
Banner/Donna Criminale: How to distinguish a criminal woman, according to Cesare Lombroso and his successors
Donna Criminale in Florence
Banner/Donna Criminale: Beware! New God, hidden in market.
Banner/Donna Criminale: Blind Spot Society, fairy tale for adults
Banner/Donna Criminale: Death to the artist!
Book Donna Criminale
Other works
This is the beginning. This is how I felt after a media affair caused by my earlier artwork.
Low. Fragile. Degraded. Teared apart. – It is understandable that artists generally do not use this impossible material.
Death is not enough for her, people had written in media. According to them I deserved to suffer more.
Why is this image white? It is white, because this is the colour that witnessed me to be a criminal.
A white dress proves that she is a shere swindler, argued a retired museum director of me in the main national newspaper. This surrealistic logic tells it all: nurses, maids, cleaning women, all those underpaid women, now we know what they are, criminals.
Censorship never begins by saying: now we censor this. It is a much more nuanced, and surreal, question.
What was my crime? It was very simple. Showing a piece of reality.
The banned artwork was an activist installation that asked the ethics of a megapopular part of market, teen porn. – According to researchers, it is the largest genre of mainstream porn in the moment and turned out to be the fastest-growing genre between 2005-2013, searches for “teen porn” had more than tripled during that period. In the police attack and trial it was proved, that authorities have nothing against producing and consuming this part of popular culture. Only critical art or ethical questionning are considered as sex crimes.
The police cleaned the work away the first day. In market society, it is important to give impression that business goes on without harm to anyone, bloodlessly. Critique of non-ethics will be cleaned away with criminal charges - Hundreds of bloody gloves in Donna Criminale installation in Leipzig.
Some think that the information age, or at least the digital age, meant death for censorship. But information flow is used as a method of muting. Media exploits moral panics offering repetition of disinformation.
Pornification, because it helps to sell, is in use everywhere in market. You must just give a positive picture of porn. My crime was not to believe this Bible of profit.
These dark angels of Capitalism are real world figures, right-wing leaders, who attacked against the artwork. They argued that the critique of porn business is a sex crime and socially critical art shall be silenced.
Normally criminals are covered. My case showed that people had really missed the times of public lynchings, to see the criminal to enjoy more of hating.
Sometimes good people call criminals those, whom they want to exclude from society. The sentence by stoning is in some countries reserved for raped women, or for those accused of adultery. The western society books the same judgment, as a hygienic media version, for those who criticize porn industry. - Banner Donna Criminale.
Big black car came. Must have been a funeral coach. – Performance Stoning to Death
Two men took the coffin from the car. – Performance Stoning to Death
The prelate of stoning told: someones’s days will be soon over. Priest’s talk repeated already published hate talk and offered arguments why killing was now a moral obligation. ”When you throw stones, your hands do not get dirty, but your souls become clean”. – Performance Stoning to Death
In this performance the main artists were gallery visitors, whom were asked to go from words to deeds, to stone the criminal, me, to death. ”Why must an artist be stoned? The dirt that is swelling in the world is caused by art. Opinions, which cannot be converted to money, must be destroyed”.
The day after the stoning people were invited to come to spit over the remnants of the corpse, which was then carried to a refuse dump. – Performance Stoning to Death
Survived, but only half alive, as a despised outlaw. - Flyer, Beijing
How to know that somebody is guilty (of fucking everything)? The colour of toilet paper will tell.
Famous criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) saw criminality in people’s faces. But absurd methods in exclusion are not over. – Banner/Donna Criminale
Photograph as scientific evidence of criminality. Two indicators of criminality in a tabloid newspaper image of me: a) dressed in white b) walking hand in hand with her man. – Banner/Donna Criminale
Why a civilized, educated country like Finland wants to see critical art as a crime? Because social criticism is badly paid.
Lombroso spoke about born criminals. According to Lombroso ”A certain proportion of criminals exhibits immoral tendencies from birth”. I was born so. – Banner/Donna Criminale
Installing exhibition in Leipzig.
Donna Criminale banners in Halle 14, Leipzig 2012.
Toiletpaper goddess as its first version in a high industrial hall in Leipzig.
The process - socially critical art seen as degenerate art - made me experience that the gloomiest moments in history were not so far away. Our age, with its rise of populism, exclusion, and extreme right, has much in common ideologically with the 1930s.
Hygienische Neoliberalistische Blut Arbeit Macht Frei. Blood paint on cleaning rags.
The Biennial of the Lynched. The winners seldom celebrate the lynched ones.
In Leipzig, Donna Criminale was about 1000m2 large rhizome-like installation. The series Blindfold installed in plastic pails.
Blindfold. The installation constructed of cleaning equipments and antique-framed portraits.
Scream, from series Blindfold. Mediaimagery manipulated unrecognisable. - In the earlier censorhip case it was demanded that art can criticize market-based values only by blinding brands and making protagonists unrecognisable. The request turns reality to fantasy and makes social critique impossible.
From series Blindfold. An advertisement blindfolded. – Public imagery strives for more publicity. In my works this pursuit has been turned upside down: celebrities or stars become unknown saints, or screams from darkness.
From series Blindfold.
From series Blindfold.
A poster from the exhibition Blinded, Berlin.
Spread from the book Donna Criminale. Series Blindfold.
Spread from the book Donna Criminale. How the concept of the public intellectual has changed since Zola’s time. A shift from ’J’accuse’ to ’Je m’amuse’ -attitude.
From the exhibition Blindfold, Ljubljana. Opening speaker imitates art.
Visitor imitates art. From the exhibition Blindfold, Ljubljana.
Criminal night
Donna C in Weimar
Donna C in Joensuu
Donna C in a chapel in Ponte de Lima, Portugal 2016. First, another bigger church was planned to be the exhibition place, but the bishop did not accept by saying that the work reminded too much of reality some hundred years ago, women hanged by the church under the Inquisition.
Donna C in Florence
A criminal in a church. Ponte de Lima 2016.
Donna C in the National Museum of Algeria, Algiers 2016.
Donna C in Florence
The Life and Death of a Criminal
Criminals often wonder untill their death what they have done. Me too. In crimes, as well in art, important is, however, not a personal story or sole object, but what it reveals of society. In this story, a hardened criminal meditates why it would be so much better for a developed western society, to have her executed.
Donna Criminale -project presents a hanged goddess constructed of toilet paper, a material regarded as the most banal and worthless: a patron saint of those who are thought to be low or marginal, the wrong kind of people, ‘the others’. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has noted that in contemporary consumer society, we have begun to see the poor, those who cannot participate enough in consuming, as criminals.
Donna Criminale is a project documenting social questions around a banned artwork and dealing with new forms of censorship and social inequality in contemporary market-based society. – The hybrid conceptual-political project includes an installation with variable dimensions, a toilet paper sculpture, a ‘stoning to death’ -performance, photographic prints based on a digital collage, and a book.
The project interprets the contemporary market economy as a mystery religion, worshipped every day and everywhere on the globe, and striving to secure its position as the first global religion. It is successful, because instead of suffering and ethics, it speaks of winning and never-ending enjoyment. It has, at least in advertisements and hopes, made the luxurious surrealism come true. Women have to serve as the sacrificial animal and fetish of this flourishing social structure. After decenniums of development in gender equality, market society has attracted women to focus on seduction: to consume and to advertise it, but also to embody it.
As Bauman states, the hedonistic consumerism has a counter-effect, growing inequality. The ”low” workers in white gowns, from nurses to housemaids and cleaning ladies, have often been treated degradingly, as cheaper or more inhuman than toilet paper.
Contemporary consumerist society has also resulted in a new kind of censorship, founded on market-based values and neoliberal ideology. The project Donna Criminale is based on a real and personal case of an artist as a despised criminal who touched a taboo. In this true story behind the work, an artwork led to a trial and the artist was found to be a guilty criminal, who was prohibited to criticize a mass market phenomenon, although the production and consumption of the same market were bypassed as legal. If in advanced capitalism those in lower social positions are treated as criminals, the same can be true for an artist who comments on social phenomena. The book studies the blind spots in society around this art trial case, and gathers together different visual parts and artworks in the project.
The religious status of market capitalism, its position as a taboo outside criticism, was clearly seen in this art trial case in Finland. It was required that the holy trinity of advertisements, celebrities and porn can only be referred to if the brands and stars are masked and remain unknown. It was expected that when speaking about the market, we need blindfolds – a demand that makes a truthful view and critique impossible.
The banners of this project explore how to recognize a criminal woman – a famous Italian positivist criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, often cited as the father of criminology, wrote a book on the same theme over a hundred years ago. Lombroso tried to distinguish criminals on the basis of their appearance, and saw criminals as being born as such rather than made. If Lombroso understood that a born criminal has large ears, his Finnish successors saw that an artist dressed in white (the color of the standard toilet paper), must surely be a criminal.
This thought, presented by Lombroso, of certain inferior groups of humans, can be found at the root of the values of the Third Reich. It is not so long ago when those interpreted as being lower were gathered to be retrained, i.e. eliminated. A similar belief that certain people are ”objectively” higher, better, more worth of profit, is also alive in contemporary democratic society with its special kind of censorship.
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Ongoing project, can be exhibited as a smaller or bigger whole.
A rhizome-like entity or multiplicity, where one part leads to another.
Includes various visual, performative, philosophical/theoretical parts:
- installation of a hanged toilet-paper goddess
- performance Stoning to Death
- installations Biennial of the Lynched, Hygienische Neoliberalistische… etc.
- big banners 2 x 1,5m (8 pieces)
- image series Blindfold (about 70 small pieces in antique frames)
- image series Blind Spot Society (60 x 80 cm, diasec, 6 pieces)
- lectures at international conferences on the themes of the project: socially critical art, censorship, aesthetics in market society
- book
Picture&essay-book "Donna Criminale: Capitalism as Religion, Market Criticism as Crime", BGBG, 128 pages, colors 4/4, 29x24 cm, languages English/Finnish. Artworks and graphic design by Ulla Karttunen. Texts by PhD, Ass. Professor Mojca Puncer; PhD, Professor Anita Seppä; PhD, Professor Yrjö Sepänmaa; and Ulla Karttunen.
Places:
Helsinki 2009 (performance), Beijing 2010 (conference +flyer), Ljubljana 2011 (solo exhibition), Ljubljana 2011 (symposium linked to solo exhibition), Joensuu 2011 (solo exhibition), Cartagena 2011 (conference), Geneva 2011 (conference), Leipzig 2012 (installation c. 1000m2, group exhibition), Weimar 2012 (installation, group exhibition), Wien 2012 (conference), Berlin 2013 (solo exhibition), Warsaw 2013 (conference), Torino 2013 (conference), Porvoo 2014 (solo exhibition), Yokohama 2014 (conference), Joensuu 2015 (installation, group exhibition), Prague 2015 (conference), Lappeenranta 2016 (installation, group exhibition), Florence 2016 (installation, group exhibition, best project prize), Ponte de Lima 2016 (installation, group exhibition), Seoul 2016 (conference), Algiers 2016 (installation, group exhibition), London 2017 (group exhibition)
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