Kristoffer Ala-Ketola:

Infatuation with the Never Ending Past (2022)

Infatuation with the Never Ending Past is constructed from hundreds of scenes and shots which together create a sequence of association, an absurd narrative, and a proposition for an edited history.

Kristoffer Ala-Ketola combines vignettes of his personal life with constructed studio imagery to portray a queer journey which juxtaposes the personal and shared, symbolist and documentative, directed and intuitive, archived and edited. Ala-Ketola meditates on the roles of being a director, editor, performer, viewer, subject and object simultaneously by examining his diaristic video clips, recounting them into a fantasy of a past.

The video references friendship, joy, community, partying, nature, animals, bugs, and the memories people save in their devices in order to evoke recognizable spaces of human connection, shared consciousness, and being alive.

Kristoffer Ala-Ketola is a multidisciplinary artist from Oulu, Finland who graduated from Yale School of Art with a Master of Fine Arts in 2019. His works have been previously exhibited in 4th Ward Project Space in Chicago, Shin Gallery in New York, and Kunsthalle Helsinki, and he has also participated in video screenings at the Helsinki International Film Festival and Video Art Festival Turku. Ala-Ketola’s work engages in recurring themes of human emotion, crisis, and dreaming.

Mediabox is Forum Box gallery’s space dedicated to media art. The program is created together with AV-arkki.

There are three steps to the media art space Mediabox, but the work is also available for viewing on a tablet by request. Please don’t hestitate to contact our staff if Mediabox is inaccessible for you.