Surreal Exhibition [30th Aug. 2025]

I went to see a surreal art exhibition in the Tampere Art Museum back in April.

I really liked it. Here are some things that stood out to me. (Please excuse my stupidity.)

[Part 1: wuh?]

I may be artistic, but that does not mean I can understand art. I mean I'm not one of those of people who will look at a painting and then come up with 3-4 paragraphs worth of stuff about its meaning or themes and whatnot. Of course, there are a few exceptions to this if a piece really stands out to me but if you show me a drawing of a blue circle that inside an another blue circle or whatever and ask me what the meaning is, I'm not going to be able to tell you anything.

This is exactly how I felt when I first walked up the stairs and entered the first room of the exhibition.

..It was suprisingly sexually motivated.

(I was there with my parents so that was kind of awkward but anyways..) They pretty much just took all of the horny pieces from the exhibition and shoved them in the first few rooms.

And LOOK, I get it. I'm not trying to downplay that type of art in any way. (would be very hypocritical of me considering the type of shit I often draw) BUT it was really funny specifically because of these audio box thingies.

Basically, we were given these little boxes to hold that had a speaker on them. Some of the artworks had this little thing under them that you would have to touch with the audio box and the box would then tell you something about the artwork.

So there I am, ear stuck to the box listening to a recording of a guy telling me about the how the artist of a specific sculpture got turned on by female legs.

Incredibly informative, thank you very much.

Also, the recording was like 3 minutes long. He talked about this sculpture and its meaning like his career depended on it. Meanwhile I'm just thinking that there's no way the artist put this much thought into this. And this happened with pretty much every piece from the first part of the exhibition.

Very funny, or maybe I'm just too dumb to get the full meaning. One of the pieces was a sculpture that literally just looked like this:

Reminds me of this ProZD skit.

There were a few rooms that were full of surrealist photography. (also very horny) And the only thing that stood out to me from one of the rooms was the security guard who was guarding the photos so no one would do anything to them. It was just really funny to me because the walls were filled with stuff that could basically be considered softcore porn and this guy was just standing there like:

[Part 2: Cool shit]

Okay, enough of that.. Let's talk about the stuff I really liked.

Tony Oursler, an "installation artist"

There were a few pieces from him at the exhibition but one thing that stood out was "Talking Light". There was a dark room with a single hanging light bulb in the middle. It whispered different lines. I forgot what it actually said but still thought it was cool.

Another Oursler piece I liked was like an eyeball that was looking around from the upper corner of a room. They had put a like a white ball up there and the eye itself was a video that was projected onto the ball. I don't remember what it was called but Oursler has made a lot of similar pieces which can be found from his website

Here's a few of other artworks I liked:

"Le Genie de l'espece" by Wolfgang Paalen
(Img source)

thatsjustfuckinrad

"Los caracoles" by Oscar Dominguez
(Img source)

"I Speak What I see" by Penny Slinger
(Img source)

And this one really cool painting by a man named Gerardo Chavez
(Img source)

You might notice that the photo of it is not very good. That's because I can't seem to find the actual piece from the internet and I didn't take any photos myself when I was there. I'm kind of regretting it now because I really like this guy's work. I got a soft spot for bizarre-looking creatures.

The only reason why I have this image is because the artwork happened to be in the background of a photo that I found from the museum's website.

Unfortunately, Chavez passed away in June of this year. I tried to look up more information about him but his Wikipedia page doesn't really say much and the mentioned sources don't really lead anywhere. The link to his website is dead and the Wayback Machine didn't really show anything either. Chavez was Peruvian so a lot of the information regarding him (including his autobiography) is written in Spanish.

The name of the piece is apparently "Pendant le vaudou, il secouait la tete" (don't know why it's in French) and I only know the title because I tried to look it up online while I was at the museum so it was still in my search history.

Wish I had a better photo but oh well..
Rest in piece Chavez.

WAIT HOLD ON! As I'm writing this, I discovered from a random Youtube video about him that his dead website listed on Wikipedia (gerardochavez.com) is not actually his only website. There is another one that has more information (gerardochavez.pe). This one isn't active right now (it shows a "coming soon" page) but the Wayback Machine actually has some stuff about him this time. Still couldn't find this specific piece but there were some other artworks that I really like such as these two.

("El Otro Ekeko" and "Animal de Medianoche")

More of his work can also be found on this random auction website and by searching his name on social media.

[Part 3: Moving pictures]

The exhibition had 3 little movie theatre rooms. The first 2 were just playing short clips from surreal films such as "Eraserhead" by David Lynch (great film),"La montana sagrada" or "The Holy Mountain" by Alejandro Jodorowsky (which I still haven't seen and I should because it seems interesting and a couple of my friends from the military said that it's good) and "Un chien andalou" or "An Andalusian Dog" by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali.

There was one thing that kind of annoyed me about the Andalusian Dog clip. They cut the fuckinthing right before my favourite part of the film. (You can watch it on Youtube in case you're interested)

They showed the part where the man is trying to drag the 2 pianos that had the dead cows on them but right after that would have been the scene where he gets his hand stuck in the door and there's a shot where the palm of his hand has a hole and there are ants coming out of it.

I really like this shot. It used to be my Discord profile picture. And they cut it >:(

The third theatre was actually showing a whole artwork instead of random clips. It was a short film/video collage/not really sure what it was called "Heaven's Gate" by Marco Brambilla. It was an 8-minute-long looping video projected on to a vertical screen like this:

anditwasbizarre

I don't even know how to properly describe it. Here's a Youtube video that has some clips of it but it's not the whole thing.

Really detailed, really cool, uhhhhh...
..yeh, lovedit.

Sort of reminds me of something like Cameron's World.

Anyways, checkoutthiscoolmagnetIgotoutofthere

The mouth eye shall watch me every time I open my fridge.

That is all, thank you for reading my rambles.
Goodbye