Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Heidi Hänninen
KAS! Kontula Art School is a community-based street/art school -project initiated by artist-researcher Heidi Hänninen in Kontula suburb 2019. This socially engaged public art practice can be seen as a form of fourth sector activism and as a gift of democracy that can benefit other societal actors as well.
Heidi Hänninen (M.A / M.F.A) is a community artist with the background of art education (University of Lapland, 2017) and concrete sculpture (Uniarts, Helsinki, 2016). Heidi has studied at the Department of Monumental Painting in St. Petersburg (2008-2009) and after her year in exchange she has been painting murals both in Finland and abroad and working within different street art assembles.
Since the beginning Heidi has been using and developing street art as a form of socially engaged art practise. For Heidi street art is a method for the community art and a way to (learn to) communicate, not only between residents, but also between people, organizations, institutions who might be otherwise far away from each other. In her art practise street is the arena for visibility and existence, where new realities can be born and seen, enabling people to encounter.
As her PhD Heidi is preparing her research related to socially engaged public art for the Doctoral Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Uniarts Helsinki. Heidi lives and works in East Helsinki suburb Kontula, where she has been leading her communal KAS! Kontula Art School project focusing on public art and street art (since 2019) and working with the locals since 2016. The aim of the research is to build ethically sensitive methodological tool kit for the future to be used in culturally diverse and socially layered contexts, including substance use cultures.
www.heidihanninen.com
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