Sini Pelkki‘s film Present is a continuum of spaces and situations that are interpreted through the camera lens and the reflections of mirrors. The work investigates the form and the structure of the moving image, the choreography of recording with the camera, and the act of filming and placing oneself in the image. The performances recorded in the work are precisely of the act of filming and the filming situation, their defined essence becomes clear through the presence of the camera. The camera is, as it were, the central character of the work, while agency is also given to the rock wall and landscape, the interior and the glass plates leaning against the walls, sounds, the human body, composition and gestures, the space and time that remain between them.
The openness associated with the situations depicted in the work and, on the other hand, the limits of definition, i.e. what is recorded by the camera and the details and events that remain outside the recording, build an experience in which what is seen, is in constant interaction with what is invisible, behind the camera, outside, that has happened before or is about to happen.
The choreography of the camera, a kind of wandering, and the gradual revelation of things through movement. The stopping of the image in a certain demarcation, in a certain gesture, opens a way for the joint examination of the information and formation of knowledge produced by the camera. Outside the framed image, the interpreted data, is the omnipresent limitlessness. The presence of the human body, as well as the narration, poetic text in the end of the work, locate the examination as part of the physical reality experienced with the body. Locating is difficult, it is laborious, it is incomplete and changing, and in its presence perfect. Locating is also at the heart of making a work of art. The work and its construction are a web of choices and observations. A work of art can never be out of place, there are no mistakes in it.
At the beginning of the work, two images of mirrors placed on a pile of gravel and leaning on the edge of a quarry are reminiscent of Robert Smithson’s 1969 photo series Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1–9). A similar fragmentation of landscape and image also occurs in Pelkki’s Present. Smithson wrote about mirrors, time and space in his text:
“A scale in terms of “time” rather than “space” took place. The mirror itself is not subject to duration, because it is an ongoing abstraction that is always available and timeless. The reflections, on the other hand, are fleeting instances that evade measure. Space is the remains, or corpse, of time, it has dimensions. “Objects” are “sham space,” the excrement of thought and language. Once you start seeing objects in a positive or negative way you are on the road to derangement. Objects are phantoms of the mind, as false as angels.”
Smithson, Robert. “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan.” Artforum, Vol. 8, no. 1, (September 1969).
Arttu Merimaa
Curator and visual artist
Sini Pelkki is an artist based in Helsinki. Pelkki works with photography, film, space and its’ rhythm. Her most recent exhibition Allow at photographic gallery Hippolyte, in April 2025, was a spatial arrangement, a variation of the exhibition Evolving Window on view at Turku Art Museum, in the autumn of 2024. Pelkki’s film, Embarkation (2011) is currently installed in Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma, in the collection exhibition Rock, Paper, Scissors. The Finnish Cultural Foundation’s regional fund awarded Pelkki with their Art award in 2025 and The Finnish Art Society’s William Thuring designated art prize in 2014.