Statement
"The Weeping Gallery" invites the public to cry for humanity and is a piece that consists of two elements: a web page that explains the project and collects video material from the public, plus a screen and server in a physical location that displays the material. The public can just drag their video onto the web page and when the upload is finished the video will be automatically displayed on the screen in the physical location. It is a You Tube museum of sorts, but with specific images of people crying.
On one level, Sami Kallinen, the artist behind the project, sees the project as a social experiment. He has built the system out of curiosity to see a) how willing people are to film themselves weeping and to contribute: it is not easy, and b) if they do, to see what kind of material the system will attract. In one sense it could be argued that Kallinen is working with found footage, only he has made a system where the footage finds the artist and not the other way around.
The theme of crying interests Kallinen partly because of the sheer force of the images themselves. Images of people crying for real have tremendous power to reveal the personality of the people depicted in the images. The many nuances of the subtle and less subtle grimaces and facial movements the person displays make for a thorough portrait of the subject. If the face is the mirror of the soul then the crying face is even more so. There are also many questions that arise while watching them: why is it so confrontational for us to see such faces? Why are they often so ugly?
Another question is, of course, the social aspect of crying. Charles Darwin argued in a paper about emotional expressions in 1872 that English culture was the furthest developed as English men only cried when encountering the most intense moral suffering. This was in contrast to men in the rest of Europe, who cried far more easily. He also made a point that savages cried for the pettiest of reasons. Darwin would probably have been happy to see how the world has developed since. In 1972, the American presidential candidate Edmund Muskie lost the election because he broke down in tears during a televised speech in response to a newspaper article that had smeared his wife. He had been leading the opinion polls till that moment. It is considered to be a sign of weakness to cry. Especially for men to cry publicly. On the other hand, there are organisations in the US that try to campaign for people to start crying more for emotional release and well being. As a critique of modern therapy and the "psychologisation" of modern society, they argue that people should relearn the basic natural processes of emotional release. They organise workshops to teach people to learn to cry again.
For Kallinen, Weeping Gallery also offers a forum for people to make a statement. The venue is not as public and accessible as You Tube or the like; it is less accessible than uploading the videos anywhere on the net. The venue is both public and intimate, public enough to constitute a statement but private enough not to seem too vain to participate in. It is a wailing wall of sorts.
It is not the intention that the life of the piece will start and end during this exhibition at Kunsthalle Helsinki: on the contrary, this is meant to be a seed of something that hopefully will grow in the coming years. The plan is to keep the installation running after the show ends, in other perhaps temporary locations, and as part of different exhibitions around the world. It has been selected for Ready Media exhibition at The Netherlands Media Art Institute starting at 18th January 2007 in Amsterdam and an exhibition at the Belgrade Museum of Modern Art in October 2007.
