HANNA SAARIKOSKI: SUDDENLY IT’S EVENING
”Everyone stands alone at the heart of the world/ pierced by a ray of sunlight, / and suddenly it’s evening”
Salvatore Quasimodo
In Hanna Saarikoski’s new video-installation, seven separate videos build an illusion of a coherent landscape. The material of the installation was gathered during 2015-2021 in seven different locations.
It appears as if nothing much is happening. A crow flies to the top of a tree, a fresh pile of logs appears at a logging square. Each screen is like a moving, living painting (of a landscape) Not everything can be seen at the same time. An abandoned building collapses behind one’s back, just as one’s attention is drawn to a flock of birds fluttering in the southeastern sky. It is snowing, somewhere else, a moon rises.
Hanna Saarikoski (1978, Kannus) lives and works in Somerniemi. She graduated from Academy of Fine Arts in 2008. In her work, Saarikoski combines painting, drawing, video- and installation art, and performative elements. Her works have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Finland, including Mänttä Art Festival (2012), Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova, and EMMA
Thank you: Taike, Suomen Kulttuurirahasto, Alfred Kordelinin säätiö
KAIJA HINKULA: FIRE HOSE 50 BAR
A mask, a souvenir and 50 meters of fire hose
Kaija Hinkula’s exhibition Fire Hose 50 Bar consists of paintings and readymade elements. In the installations objects mix with painted surfaces forming two- and three-dimensional, and spatial art works within the context of extended painting. Where does the painting start and where does it end? What happens when everyday objects are positioned in new order and context?
The exhibition creates visual thought connections, in which reality and fantasy meet. References to the modern world and contemporary events – Hinkula’s symbolic use of objects such as fire extinguishers and shopping carts transform themselves into colourful installations as a part of the world’s playground. A game, that can also turn absurd, is formed.
Kaija Hinkula (1984) graduated as an artist in 2008 and gained her Master’s degree in fine and visual arts in 2021 from Academy of Fine Arts (FI). Hinkula is interested in exploring the limits of visual art forms and the diversity of painting in its contemporary context. In her works, Hinkula often uses materials from everyday life combining their forms with references from the history of modernist painting. Her works are in the collections of Finnish National Gallery and Oulu Art Gallery
MINNA SUONIEMI: DENSE WATER
Minna Suoniemi’s exhibition Dense Water intertwines the materiality of film and photographs with the materiality of the ageing body and transgenerational bodily experience of being in-excess and excessiveness. The exhibition Dense Water presents three new works, Bond, 4k video, I’ve been bad, but I’ve been good too, film and Dark Room, installation.
The story began with my grandmother, born in 1924. This woman, unfitting to her own time and rural community, unintentionally broke her family, and herself. I feel something of her exists in me.
The material is filmed with an old super 8 camera from 1972, the same year I was born. Battery acid has leaked in it, there are short circuits, the film slows down or stops rolling. The film is also expired and faded. We are both ageing.
In spring 2021 my son and I spent three weeks in isolation, and these rooms became a cage for us two, the world outside the windows. I began photographing us imprisoned in our home with a pinhole camera I made of an iphone box. I developed the negatives in our bathroom with coffee, vitamin C and bicarbonate of soda, and fixed them with dense salt water.
When my son had the virus, I rinsed his nasal passage with salt water. I thought of the salty water inside our bodies, his, mine, my mother’s and grandmother’s. In the darkroom the dense salt water crystallized in two days as the water evaporated. Inside us the water flows. What if something of my grandmother still flows in me.
Minna Suoniemi (b. 1972) is a Helsinki -based artist working with moving image and sound. Her practice draws from embodied experience and feminist knowledge production and she has worked on themes such as control, body, class and family. Suoniemi has exhibited internationally and some of her works are included in the collections of i.e. Kiasma, HAM, Saastamoinen foundation and the Finnish state art collection.
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