Featuring: Miklos Gaál, Kenny Hunter, Andreas Schulenburg, Nebojsa Seric (Shoba), Santeri Tuori.

Curated by Robert Knafo.

Kidding features five contemporary artists who address the subject of children and adolescence.

Each of these artists takes the depiction of children, or of things associated with childhood, as a point of departure for explorations that variously touch on questions of identity, individuality, social behavior, cultural norms and political consciousness.

Finnish artist Miklos Gaál is represented by a suite of photographs of children taking swimming lessons at a municipal pool. Varying the focus of his photographs so that they are by turns blurry and sharp, Gaál transmutes real places and events into so many toyland vistas.

Scottish artist Kenny Hunter’s sculpture of a young adolescent with eyes cast reflectively downward and one arm raised defiantly upward (“Feedback Loop”) offers an icon to the particularly adolescent (and in many ways conflicting) experiences of self-absorption and idealism. The Bosnian-born Nebojsa Seric (Shoba), long interested in producing images and objects at the intersection of personal experience and the forces of history and culture, presents a selection of photographs from an ongoing project to photo-document children at various public events, dressed in various political and cultural costumes.

German-born, Copenhagen-based artist Andreas Schulenburg constructs objects out of felt that look like strangely fractured and reconstituted children’s toys, and that offer metaphors of cultural and psychic dislocation. Helsinki-based Santeri Tuori presents “Bogeyman,” one in an ongoing series of video installations that focus on very young children doing simple acts – smiling, putting on a t-shirt, for example – in super slow motion. Tuori’s videos impart a sense of the particular nexus of physical and intellectual capabilities and social knowledge possessed by – or rather that posesses – a young child.