By Martina Čermáková

“Burning Baghdad” installation @ Vernon Gallery, Heřmanova 12 (4.7. - 7.9.)

“Mindscape” exhibition coupled with concerts

and theater performance @ Nová síň Gallery, Voršilská 139 (17.8. - 14.9.)

Visually, it’s quite a flat thing: The CD painting, checkered in shades of grey, with three of the darker squares holding CDs. It’s what you can’t see that reveals a whole different dimension. The three CDs contain recordings of some of the good things artist Kirsimaria E. Törönen-Ripatti experienced in the days following her father’s death in 2004.
“It was a personal tragedy process,” she says about the work.
Although there’s a lot of Törönen-Ripatti in her art, she explores the divide between the public and private spheres. Searching for ways to re-define art and move art history forward—“Otherwise it’s just crap or advertisement,” she notes—she experiments with techniques and materials to tell stories, calling it “an ongoing fairy tale.” Törönen-Ripatti will allure Prague audiences by displaying her “Burning Baghdad” series at Vernon Gallery through Sept. 7, and the eye-soothing “Mindscape” series at Nová síň Gallery beginning Aug. 17 through Sept. 14.

Törönen-Ripatti spent her childhood in the Middle East, often drawing on her experiences through her art. It’s not about political statements—but one person’s perspective.
“We tend to think that the Islamic culture and the Western culture, that they are somehow juxtaposed,” she says. “But I grew up as a little girl and I know the crack that you have in both of them is so close to each other that I like to think of it as a circle.”
Sick and tired of everybody’s strive to go solo, to build up a name, meanwhile letting the substance of art get lost, Törönen-Ripatti brings collaborative projects to Prague. The “Burning Baghdad” installation features, for instance, a Finnish poet reciting an 18th-century love poem, and a two-minute classical cello piece composed by a co-acting musician.
Most of all, she brings the city explorations of technique. The constant shifts in technique, from metallurgical processing to the use of plexiglass for her upcoming “Mindscape” exhibit at Nová Síň gallery, are fueled by Törönen-Ripatti’s search for what art could be next, the defiance of the collective compromise of art dictated from above—by galleries or previous generations of artists.
“I don’t know any answers, I’m not giving them any solutions, I’m just giving them these visual images, or impulses, trying to get people to think for themselves,” she says. The world isn’t black and white, she tells us, but a grey mess, and you go figure out. In order to get people thinking, you don’t need to punch them in the face. There will be no harsh, cringe-worthy or bold colors at Nová Síň. Törönen-Ripatti wants us to experience something aesthetically eye-pleasing, to have us, upon enter the heavenly white gallery space, bathe in milk.

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