Urmo Teekivi

Body Work
 

Continuing my body research experiments, with this work I examine our most transformative body parts, focusing on its possible changes. Creating provocative eternal objects from everyday subjects. At the same time, commenting on what is happening in the art field, especially how artists are coping.

My work consists of two parts that are in dialogue with each other. The first collection, which I call with the common denominator “finger(at) counting days”, consists of 266 fingers installed in single row across the entire room. Under each finger is a specific date between August 30, 2021, and June 4, 2023. Each finger represents a day that I was actually in University Campus in Dals Långed. The fingers are either wax or bronze. Each bronze finger represents a day I was in or actually did something in the workshop. Every finger is for sale. I have set a starting price for one finger and an end price for the other. With the purchase of each finger, the price of the next finger increases by 5 SEK – demand-supply ratio (if the product has a market, then the price can be increased?). Behind this idea is my peasant logic – if the works are bought, with the sale of each individual work, the artist becomes one notch more famous, and the probability that the entire price scale of his works will increase due to this.

This exhibition sale is a satellite piece to my other exam work, which I was showing at the same time in the library’s art gallery with the common denominator “The Forms of Hunger”, a series of sculptures that explore the different forms of hunger that artists experience in their efforts to create and survive in the contemporary art world. Representing the artist’s abdomen in different forms, the artwork emphasizes the physicality of the creative process and the ways in which the body is both a source of power and a site of struggle for artists.

The use of my own body, specifically the stomach and fingers, in the sculptures highlights the personality of my struggle.