ROR
One of the most spectacular art events of the last year was only the second show by Revolutions on Request. Occupying much of Kiasma, Helsinki's Museum of Contemporary Art, works like a huge white escalator leading nowhere ("God Says No"), a table soccer console on which a team of plastic crucified Jesuses faces off against a team of Shiva statuettes ("Battle of the Worlds"), or cross-stitched embroidery patterns of Bob Marley formed the surprisingly fresh and vivid exhibition "Utopia." The members of ROR are not your usual bunch of art school graduates; most of them actually graduated from schools of engineering and design.
After a spectacular exhibition tour with "Terror 2000," which traveled from the Into Gallery Helsinki via Reykjavik to Stockholm, "Utopia" at Kiasma, Skulpturens Hus in Stockholm, and the Kunsthalle Kiel, plus a notable series of publications, rumor had it that the group had called it a day. In February 2002 we met ROR members Jiri Geller and Karoliina Taipale in their studio in Helsinki, only to learn that ROR had re-invented themselves as a quartet, with two studios and big plans: ROR will take part in the exhibition "Fundamentalisms of the New Order" in Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, and are planning to open ROR gallery in Helsinki,starting in May 2003, also featuring their own completely new ROR exhibition, titled: "ROR Forever".

In ROR's words taken from email conversations:

ROR is Klaus Nyqvist, Karoliina Taipale, Jiri Geller, and Panu Puolakka.

ROR is an artist group. ROR operates by producing art, exhibitions, and other related projects. Basically, we do everything by ourselves, from producing singular art works to exhibition architecture and graphic material. We curate our own exhibitions and invite other artists who can "ror." ROR was founded in 1998 as an effort to avoid the unemployment line. We started as a firm, a co-operation. In the beginning ROR was 16 freaks, hippie shit, Soviet Union, no money.
We had a big studio in the middle of the Helsinki City Transport Department depots and we worked together closely with the inventor group Heke. They had some of the most psychedelic pieces, not good as inventions, but we felt they were great art. They had a great influence on us, and actually manipulated us to start the firm. When we started, it wasn't clear at all that it was art we were producing. Very soon it became clear that the business side of the company was going nowhere; and financially, it has sucked ever since. Today ROR is immaterial, ROR is a way to exist.

We offer movement. ROR pictures revolutions, all forms of revolutions. It also stands for rotation, revolutions per minute, R.P.M., evolution, the cycle of life. Our service is to bring art back to the people. Our service also contains messages, comments, and visions, and sometimes flashes of the future beforehand. We presented the computer game "Killing Talibans" (Kokko Nieminen, 1999, pc/mac), in which one played the USA bombing the Taliban. During the last "Utopia" exhibition in Stockholm, these bombings started to happen in the real world. Also the Stockholm exhibition venue was related: it used to be the factory of Mr. Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, and in the name of Mr. Nobel they also give this famous prize for peace. Boom-Boom.

When several heads are trapped together, things start to rotate and revolve, material and immaterial, good and bad. We like it here in the art world. Sometimes our pieces take the form of craft or serial products, design or fine arts. If it's "ror," it is OK. Our works involve quality craftsmanship. They are technical and electric and we can use traditional art forms, painting and sculpture, as well. They have a connection to something deeper, like the way things usually are, when peeling potatoes.

We are dead serious with what we are doing: Mass-Produced-Do-It-Yourself-Art. Keep your tools in shape; no evolution without revolution. Our style is realism. To get there, "a job well done" is self-evident. We use the basic ice hockey rule: keep it simple and stupid.