ROR (Revolutions on Request)

Take embroidery, interior design, painting, sculpture, pop culture, motor mechanics, cross-stitch and heavy metal – throw in a little Dada spirit, and you might get somewhere close to the work of ROR (Revolutions on Request). The Finnish collective formed in 1998 as a loose band of seven artists from backgrounds as diverse as architecture, photography, animation and goldsmithing. Brought together by an obsessive devotion to the object – and a disregard for distinctions between technology and craft – the group began to make elaborate exhibition environments from their work. The first of these, TERROR 2000 (2000) toured from Helsinki to Reykjavik.

Now a core of four members, Jiri Geller, Klaus Nyqvist, Panu Puolakka and Karoliina Taipale, have continued the ROR tradition of inviting the participation of guest artists. ROR’s installations immerse the viewer in a paradoxical nihilist-utopian conception of the world, merging a hippy-like nostalgia for the handmade with an acute technological awareness in their ironic take on all things modern. Contemporary ideologies concern the group only as beliefs to be demoted and subsumed by the new society that their ‘revolution’ suggests. They view technology not as a concept weighed down with the baggage of ‘progress’ or the ‘new’. Instead, it is something to be playfully manipulated, admired for its own sake, or undermined with RORian wit.

Their works can seem variously Luddite or anachronistic and yet wickedly futuristic; they have exhibited defunct Second World War era machinery (Twist Spring Machine) alongside laser projections and a customised motorbike, (Heikki Tolonen´s Mother Load, 2001) . Digital clashes with analogue and function with decoration, as in Panu Puolakka´s pixelated explosion lampshade , which transform a violently destructive event into chic objects d´art.

Considering another of humanity´s ´grand narratives´, Jiri Geller playfully mocks religious belief in Huda Huda (2001), an outline of Buddha enlightened not through meditation, but by the ethereal power of neon. Likewise, his Battle of the Worlds (2000) makes light of fundamentalist faith by pitting a team of Shivas against a squad of Jesuses in a game of table football. The visitor plays the game, activating a play-by-play commentary and the teams´ respective holy anthems whenever goal is scored. On a more earhtly level, Karoliina Taipale evinces the absurdity of the all-poweful human being embodied by Superman. Super Man Kind (2001), is a lenticular image-one embossed with minute lenses that transform him from a superhero in flight over planet earth, to an innocuous airborne beagle. The pretentions of modernist architecture suffer a similarly bathetic fate in Atlantis (2001) by Alvar Gullichsen-an early member of ROR. A model af a neat suburban home-complete with swimming pool and double garage-becomes a decorative habitat for the residents of an aquarium.

ROR’s contribution to The Straight or Crooked Way is one of their most ambitious installations to date. They have taken over and transformed a section of the gallery, accumulating a diverse selection of works – including Klaus Nyqvist’s folksy shag pile rug, Deep Forest (2001) and his psychedelic Poppy Field (2001). All four members have realised the environment, festooned with colourful stickers, for participation and utopic reverie. ROR invite us to entertain ourselves despite our failed dreams.

Tatiana Cuevas & Erin Manns