A joint exhibition by three artists at Forum Box explores the relativity and temporal asynchrony of different durations. The artists, who all work with different media, focus on the dialogue between material processes. Digital processes construct and deconstruct the image and stretch sound, while chemical processes shape photographic paper. Water, stored for millions of years, evaporates invisibly during the course of the exhibition, in about two million seconds.
A time series of three photographs by Juuso Noronkoski serves as an introduction to the exhibition. The building in the photographs is a reference to the visible world, a place, a city somewhere in the distance. As the fog thickens and moves in front of the building, the view becomes more abstract. The event continues elsewhere in Noronkoski’s photographic works, where the shadow of the window refers to the descent of the fog curtain, to the sun, and finally to the photographic image itself. In the artist’s studio, the sunlight has traveled to a piece of paper placed opposite the window. The frame of the window delineates an event in which the light itself becomes the image.
In Tuomo Rainio’s works, temporality and duration are expressed through the abstracted human figure and through the technology that explores the recording of light. The final work, a collaboration between Tuomo Rainio and Janne Pulkkinen, will be shown at the back of the exhibition space, where the technology developed for the work records light volumetrically – as a spatial mass. The video work focuses on light and its various manifestations as grainy noise, rays and curious clouds of fog. Where attention is usually focused on things in terms of the light they reflect, the work opens up perspectives on how light invisibly radiates through the air between things, objects and people.
In Joonas Siren’s work, sound progresses through Marcel Proust’s series of novels In Search of Lost Time. The temporal structure of the mammoth 148-hour audio book thickens and expands, while it spreads through the gallery space, pulsing through it, from room to room. Parameters tied to a computer clock shape the work, creating its own temporal structure. On a daily basis, the computer moves on to the next part of the book series and spreads its temporal reach, most often slowing down the time or speed of the narrated text.
What the works in the exhibition and the artistic thinking of the authors have in common is focusing attention on something seemingly empty and in-between, on individual sounds in the middle of words. At the same time, the works open up interpretations of the relationship between light and time, exploring the slowing down of their movement. The fog obscures the simple expression of the photograph and shifts the gaze on to the event itself. The passer-by takes a step, space-time bends and the granite underfoot passes 20 years in a blink of an eye. Mediabox