‘Tarwe en walnoot’ exhibition: Jani Ruscica (Finnish Institute Benelux)

The Finnish Institute Benelux is proud to be among the partners of the upcoming solo-exhibition of the Finnish artist Jani Ruscica.

Presented in the venue of 1646 Gallery, The Hague, Tarwe en Walnoot is a work that questions specificity, the essence of things, the edges that define identities and what something actually is. The exhibition questions the relationship between signs and their meaning. Characters/signs/letters are animated or take human or animal shape, they have their own will, or disappear into a pattern, an image. Specificity happens when essence becomes meaning, when it becomes a sign, gets put in a word, an index, a sentence, a book, when it’s put on a shelf and left there.

When one looks at meaning in signs and symbols, it becomes clear that nothing is necessarily set in stone, and we, humans, tend to struggle with ambiguity. It raises questions about how we try to pinpoint or ‘catch’ the world around us into language, in all its shapes and sounds. Tarwe en Walnoot challenges us to consider and to embrace this innate sense of shifting and changing.

Playing with semiotics, Ruscica wants to disrupt order. Using a variety of mediums — wood cut, sound, video, performance, photography, and sculpture — Ruscica’s practice investigates the ties between interpretation and representation, collapsing boundaries of matter, language and meaning.

The exhibition will be open to the public for a month, from July 8 until August 8. You can find further information on the artist and his art works on the website of the venue, 1646.nl.