Hélène Baril was born in the French Alps, but grew up by the sea, the same part of Brittany frequented by the great filmmaker/biologist Jean Painlevé, who among other things, practiced filming under the sea. After getting an MA in literature, Hélène quit her job teaching French to study art. Moving to Finland, she began a career painting houses, purposely confusing the work of fine arts and decoration. Recently, she’s been developing a “tale” involving racecars. In 2011, she created Orlandus Gallery, inspired by a fictional Finnish painter and racing car driver from the early 1800s. The artist also served as inspiration for SBK, an experimental collaborative Hélène founded in 2012, which uses a car for meetings, projects, and as a working tool. Constructing its name and logo after Shell Oil, SBK is “an allegorical and poetic initiative,” whose sphere of operation touches literature, geography, economy, environmentalism, and popular psychology. In 2013 she started a collaboration with anthropologist Michael Taussig in what they call their Sea Theater. Hélène’s work is a fairy tale aimed at confusing real and fictional worlds, or simply encountering the one into the other.


www.sbkland.com (racing car tale)

17.4.13

North Uist Island

So far SBK hasn't collapsed on North Uist Island, Outer Hebrides, Scotland. It has even succeeded. SBK will write more in a close future about its feeling regarding that stunning-mind-blowing island. For now images will make the story. Finnish SBK Karhu (bear) is back working on projects, experimenting video shoots (https://vimeo.com/user9972742), drawing, creating new folks. This animal series  stands between the ideas of collapse and succeed. (here refering to Jared Diamond's book, Collapse, How societies choose to fail or succceed)



animal 1






animal 2






animal 3






animal 4






animal 5






animal 6






animal 8





animal 9