Hell Disco

Techno music fills the Art Museum Tennis Palace – the Spanish artists Ana Laura Aláez has built a lightning bolt -shaped disco and bar with a star-studded sky above in the arched second-floor hall of the museum. The first performer at Hell Disco, which was designed specifically for Helsinki, is Ana Laura Aláez’ partner, the German techno musician Daniel Holc who is known around the world as ASCII.DISKO. The museum will host a club evening on five weekends with Finnish and foreign performers.

Ana Laura Aláez (1964, Bilbao) is an exceptional and refreshing phenomenon in contemporary Spanish art. Her trademarks are spaces and moods and she loves to introduce things to locations where they do not really belong. She began her career as an installationist by decorating a clothes shop in a Spanish shopping centre to her own liking. To the great astonishment of the visitors, nothing was for sale in the shop. In the renowned Reina Sofia art museum she built a nightclub with a bar and astonished the usual art crowd while managing to attract youth to the museum. In Paris in the Palais de Tokyo she built a fully-functioning beauty salon.

To Ana Laura Aláez the traditional mode of making art is completely insignificant, though she did start her career in the early 1990s making traditional sculptures and photographs. Since then, she has made installations and promoted a perfume, collaborated with Absolut Vodka and made music in the Girls on Film project. She could be an instant pop star but she prefers the artworld, just to rattle its hypocritical atmosphere. She is also her own model, muse and work of art. She is an active feminine who enjoys her life and womanhood without declaring herself a torch-bearing feminist. To her, art is life. And that is being a human and an adventure where good and bad are joined.

A book will be published on Ana Laura Aláez in conjunction with the exhibition with articles by Augustin Pérez Rubio and Rafael Doctor (Musac / Museum of Contemporary Art, León, Spain). The book has received support from Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Guided tours: Public tours free of charge in Finnish on Wednesdays at 18 o’clock and on Saturdays and Sundays at 14 o’clock; in Swedish every 1st and 3rd Sunday of each month at 13 o’clock. To book a private tour or a tour in another language, please call +358 9 310 87003.