PREVIEW: Nina Beier-Parts

Remote-controlled toy cars carry human-hair wigs. The plugholes in old sinks are blocked with cigars, and porcelain dogs are paired with porcelain vases. Nina Beier uses existing objects and materials in her works. She creates juxtapositions, producing a tangled dialogue or confrontation between the many meanings they carry.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kiasma Archive

Recurrent themes in the works Nina Beier’s olo exhibition “Parts”  include gendered roles and humankind’s relationship with more-than-human species. In the works on display, Beier has used, for instance, mechanical bulls and breast milk substitute (Beast, 2018), wigs made of real hair and remote-controlled cars (Auto, 2017), as well as massage chairs and precious metals recovered from electronic waste (Manual Therapy, 2016). Besides sculptures, Beier has created many performances during her career. One of these, Drama, will be staged at Kiasma. In it, actors are crying into a drink in the exhibition space. The performance can be seen on Fridays and Saturdays, details of times will be posted on the museum’s website. At the end of May Beier’s fountain sculpture Women & Children (2022) will be displayed in front of Kiasma. It has been acquired for the Finnish National Gallery’s collections, with the support of the New Carlsberg Foundation, and will remain on permanent display in the pool on the museum’s café terrace.  The work is a fountain composed of found bronze sculptures of women and children. The statues range in style from classical to contemporary, and all depict women and children in the nude, as has been Western art-historical convention. Water streams from the eyes of the sculptures, creating cartoonish tears that point to the fragility projected onto women and children as subjects. The artist’s crying statues reference the materialized gaze of the Fountain of Vision at the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte in Portugal as well as pop culture icons, such as cartoons dramatically expelling tears or even the crying emoji. The work’s title echoes the phrase “women and children first,” a Victorian-era maritime code of conduct wherein women and children, assumed to be the weakest aboard, should be the first saved in a perilous situation. Women & Children is installed on the High Line at Little West 12th Street where it can be viewed in the ground. The idea of repetition and copying is linked with many of Beier’s works. Massage chairs imitate the touch of the human hand, while mechanical bulls replicate an animal that will not submit to being tamed by humans. Containers on the bulls’ backs hold breast-milk substitute manufactured industrially from cow’s milk.

Photo: Nina Beier, China, 2015, Courtesy of the artist and STANDARD (OSLO), Photo: Vegard Kleven

Info: Curator: Piia Oksanen, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Mannerheiminaukio 2, Helsinki, Finland, Duration: 22/3-8/9/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, https://kiasma.fi/