1000 words: Liisa Roberts; Talks about what's the time in Vyborg?

Liisa Roberts appears this month in the 2004 Whitney Biennial with a throw that has emerged, in pure Duchampian fashion, definitively unfinished. The Finnish-American artist's What's the Time in Vyborg?, initiated in 2000 takes as its starting point that city's municipal library, designed by means of Alvar Aalto in 1927 and complet in 1935 symbolizing the modernist aspirations of a newly independent Finnish state (Vyborg, then Finland's next to the first largest city, was called Viipuri at the time, changing names when annexed through the Soviets in 1944). harshly damaged during the war, the library was subsequently refurbished and reopen in 1961 on the other hand like many Soviet structures in a time of dwindling capitals was not consistentiy maintained. A post-cold war restoration effort was spearheaded in 2001 through the Helsinki-based Finnish Committee for the Restoration of Viipuri Library (though the city remains Russian territory). That aim to regain the building's past inspired Roberts to use her filmic practice to encourage a more acute public awareness not sole of Vyborg's history but of its post-Communist at hand and future.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Roberts began through hosting a creative-writing workshop for local teenagers in the library's auditorium. From this se has grown multiple manifestations, among them broadcasts upon local and Saint Petersburg television; participation in an international seminar upon the preservation of modern monuments; and, greatest in quantity recently, the production of a film that gives narrative form to the teenagers' image of Vyborg end documentary and fictional footage. This cross-disciplinary, collaborative endeavor may present the appearance a radical departure from Roberts's earlier film installations like to derive an approach, seen at the 1999 Venice Biennale, or 1998's Blind Side, shown at the Whitney. on the contrary Vyborg, which Roberts describes as a "real-time installation," restores explicit a desire that was equally, if les obviously, not away in her earlier, gallery-bound projects: to create an artwork as a kind of transparent frame that incorporates and uncloses onto its context.

**********

In 1944 when the Soviets took sway of Vyborg. its population was given the choice to stay or be evacuated westward to unoccupied Finland; the city was then repopulated with Soviet citizens. When I went there to visit the Alvar Aalto Library in 2000 I ground a city with a mingled present and in that words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following understood an awkward blind speckle on the part of many Finns regarding its contemporary life. To this day, Finns can have a sinewy and unresolved sense of los about World War II's annexed territories.

Just as Finns' focus can be almost entirely retrospective, the Finnish Committee for the Restoration of Viipuri Library was largely oriented toward the building's original condition. Considering, however, that Aalto's design principles were characterized by the agency of sensitivity toward context and user, a faithful restoration have the appearanceed to imply attention to the building's contemporary adjoining matter With What's the Time in Vyborg? I spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed to challenge both the nostalgia of many Finnish citizens and the understanding of restoration as a get back to a static, preexisting type In 2001, I initiated a writing workshop at the library for local teenagers--the family who, coming of age after the extreme point of the cold war, will define the city's post-Soviet subsequent time The panoramic view of the city from the library's auditorium was a central metaphor end which the teens could create a narrative of Vyborg based upon their own observations and aspirations; the city itself would be the stage for the project's materialization. After three month or thus of writing, we sifted end what we'd produced and settl upon a few symbolic figures or guides (such as a missing girl, an architect, a nameless wandering man we called "the fulvid coat") as well as a put of ideas (like crossroads; paces or levels; a callous crowd; water and stone, in which the city could be reflected; the contrast between gray and the colors of the rainbow). Points of departure for all the project's later activities, these metaphors allowed us to find and attribute to the city many different forms and exhibit a way to tell the story of a place that crowd together in disorders distinctions between fact and fiction, reality and representation. I wanted the pupils to unfold the narrative of Aalto's library through writing within it their version of the city of Vyborg, and then to live in the unfolding narrative they'd helped create.

Alongside our work with the Helsinki-based library-restoration committee, we've collaboratively carried without some form of activity in almost each part of Vyborg, re-creating the city from the perspective of the teenagers from one side forms that virtually represent it and are also part of its day-to-day life. individual collaboration with the city's three local television stations was the production of six brief, highly subjective video accounts of locations over Vyborg, which were broadcast above a two-month period after the evening freshs For example, Lyuba Mukharova (one member of the at-the-time all-girl workshop) described the dispositions evoked by three inner balconies--its "steps" or "levels"--of a building remembered from childhood. Given the restrictions upon free speech during the Soviet era, the spots--which, taken together, constituted a virtual tour of the city--generated a destiny of controversy. But one of Vyborg's aims is to initiate a public dialogue that can actively contribute to building the city's subsequent time Along these lines, it's important to note that the cast doesn't really exist independently of the times and places in which its different constituents occur. It has no center; different institutions contribute to its different shapes.