PORTFOLIO

MILLA TOUKKARI


Visual artist
and printmaker
based in Helsinki, Finland

Lover’s-ear is a textual artwork in four parts, and it was written, produced and distributed during a one-month-residency at Elsewhere Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, USA, in May 2018.

Lover’s-ear explores intimacy at a distance with the self, loved ones, and strangers through personal perspectives and physical location. The 4-part text distributed via pamphlets throughout Downtown Greensboro, bedroom love letters, and window installations displayed in each of the museum's 3 floors asks audiences to bridge the notion of distance with ideas of memory, intimacy, publicity, and sensuality.

Originally foreign, the perennial Lamb’s-ear plant is now naturalized and common in many areas of the U.S. Nonetheless, Toukkari was immediately attracted to the herb when encountering it for the first time in the museum’s garden – not caused by a customary experience of beauty but rather the strange and otherwordly sensuality of the plant. The simultaneous attraction and distance to the unfamiliar also characterizes the artist’s relationship to the museum collection as a foreigner.

The arbitrary nature of this starting point – the Lamb’s-ear plant not actually being part of the museum collection – functioned as an open platform for Toukkari t oexplore any and every thought evoked while interacting with the museum. Toukkari immersed theirself into the collection and investigated the fine line between curated and censored memory, legitimate extraneousness and forbidden otherness, and recollected sensation and actual fantasy.

Text Credit: Elsewhere Museum


Project description at Elsewhere website is accessible through here.
Audio documentation of three of the altogether four texts can be listened here.

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