Pekka Ruuska
www.pekkaruuska.com
Participant in
CologneOFF IV – Here We Are!
VAD – Video Art Database
VIP – VideoChannel Interview
CologneOFF V – 5th Cologne Online Film Festival 2009
Pekka Vihtori Ruuska born in Finland in 1983, and graduated from the Geneva University of Art and Design, Switzerland in 2009. He is specialised in art within the public context and social architecture.
Ruuska´s major project has been Arteles which he established with Teemu Räsänen and Inga Mustakallio in 2009. Arteles is a futuristic networked art society based under the northern lights in the middle of forests. In 2013 he started to work on Strata, a major project which aimed to conserve and revitalise land artworks built by the pioneers of environmental art: Nancy Holt and Agnes Denes. Currently he is working with Taidekaava (Art plan), an initiative that aims to provide tools for artists and municipalities to integrate art into the very fabric of construction projects.
Ruuska sees the relationship with the audience as the principal element when construction an art project, explaining: “The process has to be honest and open, not subjective and closed. The remaining object(s) will be reflection of the community of people who participated in the building process both for now and years to come. The more opinions and viewpoints that go into the the creation of the art works, the better the final visible object will be.”
Ruuskas art does not fit in museums. He believes the most important thing artists can do is to integrate an artistic way of thinking (“artistic way of thinking = dualistic research process combining intuition and analysis”, Henry Bergson) into different fields, social groups and society as a whole. Openings are places to celebrate, change ideas and support each others´ practise in their own genuine research processes.
Ruuska is a member of several public art related peer groups and has lectured about the subject at several conferences. He also thinks that artists should keep their power and seek for collaboration, not automatically hand over their ideas and projects to art museums. “Sometimes an art museum may take the intellectual property that has been created by the artists and exploit it for their own good. As Hans Haacke says, art is also a matter of power and an artist should learn to use that force to defend their craftsmanship.”