Cuckoo Clocks – Starbucks, Burger King, Ikea

Material

Holz

Datierung

2012

About the artwork

Gentrification is often used as a positive term to describe a process of renovating deteriorated neighborhoods by means of the influx of more affluent residents. However, as prices rise it often leads to displacement of the original inhabitants. During the process comes also the eradications of the complexity of old cultures, customs and aesthetics that are created by socially and economically diverse communities.
Jani Leinonen has created a gentrified village of St. Moritz from ten traditional Swiss cuckoo clocks that larg international corporations have taken over. The forms of ancient Swiss architecture can still be seen under the freshly painted surfaces, advertisements and signs of the corporations. In Leinonen’s installation different worlds collide: old and new, progress and tradition, future and past, development and destruction. The installation is about time and its effects on a small village in the Engadin – or anywhere in the world.

About the artist

The Finnish artist Jani Leinonen plays with the systems of commodity exchange and celebrity and the marketing strategies through which they operate. He attacks symbols and marketing strategies, turning them into objects of ridicule, thereby creating clichés about our agreed marketing society and economic every-day. With these strikes, Leinonen unfolds the chain reaction we all are voluntarily involved in and plays up the iconographies of the global brand land. Leinonen’s installations are shops, bars, slot machines but also plain painting exhibitions. What is displayed, though, are not goods but an artistic allegorization that appropriates these marketing strategies only in order to unhinge their underlying assumptions about value and appropriateness. Leinonen graduated from Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2002. His works have been exhibited widely internationally, i.e. at the Nordic Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennial, Galerie Gmurzynska, Wilhelm Hack Museum Ludwigshafen and the Frankfurter Kunstverein.