Jussi Koitela

Jussi Koitela is identified as a Visual Artist and Curator. His practice spans curatorial projects, works and installations, and critical writing on contemporary art and artistic labour.

Recorded activities for summer/autumn 2016 include residencies at Treignac Projet, City Agents, EKKM (Tallinn) and Mattering the City (SixtyEight Art Institute, Copenhagen).

Contact: koitela.jussi (at) gmail.com

Jussi Koitela is a visual artist and curator whose practice sits at the meeting point of contemporary art, institutional critique and reflective writing. Working across curatorial projects, artistic works, installations and texts, the body of work treats the gallery system, its economies and its ethical demands as material as much as any canvas or constructed space. The pages here gather these strands into a single, quiet archive rather than a promotional portfolio.

Central to the practice is an interest in how art circulates — through residencies, exhibitions, symposia and public programmes — and in what happens to the labour and the mood of the artist along that route. Notes on artistic labour, economy and institutional ethics appear alongside the works themselves, suggesting that the studio and the workplace are never fully separate categories. The writing does not simply describe the art; it interrogates the conditions under which the art becomes possible.

The curatorial project Floating Ghost, presented in the context of Manifesta 10 within the framework of On Board and the symposium What Is Monumental Today?, addresses geopolitical situations between Russia and the Western world. Its title evokes the spectral presence of unresolved histories, and its treatment of monumentality asks what a public monument can still mean once shared political ground has fractured. The project was realised as part of the wider Manifesta 10 programme.

Residencies form another backbone of the record: periods spent at Treignac Projet, at City Agents, at EKKM in Tallinn and with Mattering the City at SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhagen. Such stays offer more than studio space; they place the work inside specific local economies, infrastructures and institutional climates, each of which reshapes both the pace and the subject matter of what follows. Activities from summer and autumn 2016 are documented here in that spirit.

The visual work itself moves between paintings, drawings and installations, often arranged so that objects appear to hover, dissolve or lose their footing. Spatial arrangements are treated as arguments: a suspended form or a dissolving sequence can suggest fragility, ephemerality, and the precariousness of the systems that house them. Photographs of these installations are reproduced with generous space around them, allowing the empty room to remain part of the composition.

Writing published here approaches institutional melancholy as something more than an atmosphere. Essays consider ethical demands placed on working artists, the money and roles involved, and the ordinary emotions that accompany a life in the field. The tone is reflective rather than polemical, and the pieces read as working notes: attempts to name what is at stake when art is asked to justify itself in economic and institutional terms.

Public activity forms the third layer of the archive. Projects that extend beyond the studio — events, build processes, streams, and spoken contributions on whether speaking aloud can still make noise inside saturated public discourse — reveal an understanding of art as something that happens between people. These interventions lean toward the audience as active participant rather than passive viewer, and the documentation keeps the social dimension of the work visible.

The overall presentation is deliberately understated: muted warm-grey grounds, off-white panels, serif typography set close to Georgia, and burnt terracotta accents that mark headings and links. Images appear as plain rectangular thumbnails without rounding or shadow, separated by airy intervals and occasional thin rules. The result is a scrapbook-like, text-driven reading experience that places the artist's words and projects on equal footing, letting an unhurried page carry the weight.