Antti Laitinen

The Finnish artist, Antti Laitinen’s performances are exhaustive and very impractical, considering their final outcomes. They examine the role of the artist-hero with simple but repetitive works that culminate in modest or impermanent objects, or only in documentation.

In Bare Necessities, Antti lived in the forest for four days without food, clothes or water and documented his experience. The venture is reminiscent of Walden, which ended abruptly as Thoreau found that the reality of a minimal life in the woods did not completely agree with his idealistic expectations. In Laitinen’s work, though, the ideals of going ‘back to nature’ are childish, but not naïve.


In the video component to It's My Island, the artist is knocked about by waves as he drags and places the sandbags in a pile to form a personal patch of land in the sea. The task, reminiscent of Sisyphus’ punishment, is monumental and oppressive, but Laitinen excruciatingly hauls some two hundred bags into the water to form the mound by his own volition to make his own ‘land’. With the use of a wooden plank, presumably, the bags could be floated and levered into place much easier. It's a Buster Keaton-like slapstick to the tune of a none-too-subtle commentary on nationality and citizenship. Here is his website, and Nettie Horn gallery's.