Bridge Over Troubled Water is part of an ongoing collaborative project between the performance collective MSL (Antti Jussila and Jari Kallio) and artist Jaakko Pallasvuo that explores ideas of queerness, nonlinear time, and climate change anxiety.

MSL’s performance-based practice, initiated in 2008, focuses on collaborations in various forms. Recurring themes in their work are behavioural compulsions, rituals, gender, sexuality and isolation. Jaakko Pallasvuo’s videos, texts, ceramics and images deal with hierarchies, feelings, generational experiences and social arrangements. In previous projects, both he and MSL have worked with different collaborators to co-create and deliver performances, music, events and videos that trouble fixed notions of identity, artistic and otherwise.

Their project, and the resulting exhibition at CCA, re-imagines 1960s musical duo Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel as time-travelling protagonists whose association with a more hopeful era is at sharp odds with our increasingly precarious contemporary existence. Named after Simon & Garfunkel’s best selling album, Bridge Over Troubled Water follows them as they navigate past, present, and future post-human landscapes. Together they experience personal and ecological loss, entropy, and the impact of our insatiable fossil fuel consumption.

The exhibition at CCA will feature new material filmed on location across Finland and Lapland shown as part of a sculptural installation that includes painting, costumes, and props. Bridge Over Troubled Water marks the first time that work by MSL and Jaakko Pallasvuo has been shown in Ireland/Northern Ireland. On Saturday 4th June at 8pm a new performance developed by MSL will accompany the exhibition opening at CCA.