PORI.- Operating in the interstices of different music genres and avant-garde sound art, Circle is a rock group known for its repetitively monumental and sculptural music and trance-like, performative live shows. By inviting Circle into the museum’s exhibition context, Pori Art Museum highlights the interdisciplinary and uniquely original art-making that stems from the local underground culture.

Presented in the museum’s large exhibition hall, the group’s experimental eight-channel composition together with sculptures merging geometry, minimalism, and heavy-metal aesthetics, charge the space with sense of a singular presence. A massive pentakis dodecahedron with 60 faces is encircled by seven large speaker-like boxes, arranged with meticulous precision. Through sound, music, monolithic sculptural elements, and the presence of viewers, the installation explores the ritualistic dimensions of art: it is a place, a situation, a location—a point—where those who engage with the artwork and the space become aware of their own participation.

The group describes the work:

“PISTE exhibition delves into classic stereometry in order to exhume the non-productive essence of ritual as a means of attaining abstraction and accessing the non-conceptual realm.

The juxtaposition of suprematistic tones and modern-day monoliths presented in circular composition comes with a nod towards Circle’s affinity to Rock in Opposition movement in suggesting an overturn in the power dynamics of the panopticon. The stubborn inward directed gaze aims to abolish the inessentialities of the outer sphere.”

Founded in Pori in 1991, Circle is a rock band whose collective, uncompromising approach to art-making challenges the norms of commercial culture. The band’s career can be seen as a kind of total work of art, comprising more than 50 studio and live albums with varying line-ups and collaborations, as well as interdisciplinary exchanges with the likes of filmmaker Mika Taanila or interaction with the archives of media artist Erkki Kurenniemi. The exhibition at the Pori Art Museum is realised by the band’s standard line-up: Julius Jääskeläinen, Pekka Jääskeläinen, Jussi Lehtisalo, Tomi Leppänen, Mika Rättö, Janne Westerlund, and sound engineer Antti Uusimäki.

“I say that Beauty springs from God and resembles a circle, the center of which is goodness. And just as one cannot have a circle without a center, so one cannot have beauty without goodness”.

The Book of the Courtier (Il Libro del Cortegiano), 1528, Baldassare Castiglione