Self-bakers

between a mirror and dough

2014/15

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One day workshop,

a part of The Possibility of an Island exhibition,

curated by AXIS Art,

organised in C-Platform

Xiamen, CH

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The event is based on the video work Baking Hysteria made in 2014. 

In the video I aim to bake myself from salt dough. Without planning it beforehand, it becomes a battle between my ideas, my hands and qualities of the dough. It is a struggle about how the result should look, how I would want to be like and how it ends up looking. I get confused because making a ‘self-portrait bun’ is not as simple as I imagined.

 

I wanted to continue observing the theme of making self-portraits. As a continuation for the video, the event of the Self-Bakers took place in C-Platform in Xiamen, China. Participants who, for some reason were only women, were invited to prepare a traditional Finnish bun dough and to have fun while baking. The event began by seeing the original video and with a discussion about its concept and about an identity. The participants were not required to bake their self-portraits. The results were variable: there were self-portraits, sweet girls and angry women. There were flower buns and dumplings, paws of dogs and some boyfriend buns as well.

 

I consider the most important result of the event, the images taken and spread through social media by the participants. The photos were taken during the event, the pictures were modified, sent, discussed and spread in social media. Instead of self-portrait buns, we got ‘bun selfies’.

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The second version Other bakers, between an experience and dough was organised as a closing event of LRDC taking place in Lucitopia town, in Jiangxi Province, China in May 2019.

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