Works on Paper

A picture is worth a thousand words? Finnish artist Mika Taanila presents 
two series: an ultra-minimalist reduction of a film script in My Silence 
(On Paper) (2015) and a small library of brutally yet cleverly abused books on cinema: Film Reader (2017). Both series are extensions of previous works.

In 2013, Taanila created the video My Silence, a reductionist video that eliminated all dialogue from Louis Malle’s film My Dinner with André. Now he applied the same rigour to the original film script. Also in 2013, Taanila introduced the aesthetics of destruction in his work with the series of photograms Black and White Movies (2013). For these, he trashed his collection of VHS tapes by inflicting the same type of violence depicted in the film on the VHS cassette as an object. He then applied the same logic to books on cinema: the type of physical abuse relates to the content of the book. In collaboration with balzer projects.