Maanantai – Nine Nameless Mountains

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Artist: Maanantai
Title: Nine Nameless Mountains
Publisher: Kehrer
Year: 2013
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In the summer of 2011, Maanantai, a collective of artists from Helsinki, headed to the Lofoten islands in Norway, a mountainous island region known for its dramatic and beautiful landscape and famously featured in Edgar Allen Poe’s story “A Descent into the Maelström”. Dispensing with individual artistic visions, Nine Nameless Mountains is an amalgam of genres and approaches – a singular artist journal forged by a collective.

Producing work on site and later in the studio, the artists then reworked and developed each other’s work creating a kaleidoscopic vision of the mountains and their experience. No images are attributed and authorship remains collective. Drawings are mixed with performance, appropriated images and documents, and placed alongside landscape imagery to refreshing ends. The books only text is a series of impressionistic poems present in a fold-out towards the end. The work also consciously avoids declarative statements about the region. As the work’s title suggests, mountains, despite the names we give them, are ineffable, mutable and open to endless interpretations both collectively and individually.