Clare is a three channel sound installation by Mark Niskanen & Jani-Matti Salo that creates intimate moments of hypotheticals. Clare filters thoughts from a 14-year archive of tweets and organizes them according to the psychoanalyst Karen Horney’s theory of inner conflicts. The work is named after an alter-ego created by Karen Horney, with whom she had internal conversation. As early as the 1930s, Horney described in her works the ‘idealized self’–a product of a competitive society to which no achievement brings satisfaction. 80 years later, social media is providing the stage for satisfying our thirst for perfection. Clare asks, however, whether the idealized self is worthy of pursuit.
The production of the exhibit has been supported by the Art Promotion Centre Finland.