TIMO KELARANTA: STRANGE LOVE

Finnish Museum of Photography 1.2.–29.4.2012

Press Briefing on Tuesday 31.1. at 11 am.  The artist is present.  Welcome!
Press photos

“Photography was a strange love for me. It wasn’t a great passion at first. I don’t remember being astonished the first time I saw a print become visible in the red light of the laboratory. Photography had, as it were, crept into my consciousness and refused to leave. Now, I was on the verge of a serious relationship with it.”


Timo Kelaranta: Birds, bridges (2010)

This spring’s major exhibition focuses on photographic artist Timo Kelaranta’s (b. 1951) long involvement with photography. As a photographer Kelaranta is a poet, a master of the abstract image and of minimalism, for whom the most important thing in a picture is its form. The content of the picture is also generated by the form. The light moulds the surface, scale and space of the objects into something that was not there before. The material appears immaterial. The pictures also include words: the titles are essential parts of the works.

The exhibition contains works spanning Kelaranta’s entire career, plus totally new, recently completed photographs. To counterbalance the abstract images, also on display is a small number of portraits of his friends and family. Kelaranta is not showing his production in chronological order, or even arranged into distinct themes, rather the relative order of the works is determined by visual considerations. The moment of looking is more important than the moment of photographing.

The exhibition coincides with the publication of a book, Outo rakkaus / Strange love (Timo Kelaranta, 2012), and a small exhibition guide (Finnish Museum of Photography, 2012).

Visitors can hear the artist talk about his works (in Finnish) on the Museum’s Kännykkäguide (mobile phone guide).

Meet the Artist: Timo Kelaranta talks about his exhibition (in Finnish) at 14:00 on 4.3 and 29.4. Museum entrance fee.

The artist’s work has been supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, Alfred Kordelin Foundation and FRAME Finnish Fund for Art Exchange.

K-G ROOS – MAFIA, MARIMEKKO, MANNERHEIM

Finnish Museum of Photography 1.2.–29.4.2012

Press Briefing on Tuesday 31.1. at 11 am. Welcome!
Press photos

“I want to portray our time in wide-ranging epic form: its phenomena, human destinies and world events.”


K-G Roos: Sicily, 1959

The journalist and documentary photographer Karl-Gustav Roos’ (1937–1976) highly individual pictures are treasures of the museum archive, most of which are now being seen for the first time in an exhibition. Roos was an uncompromising idealist, whose production combines a modern form language with a socially aware attitude rooted in humanity. He was a second-generation photographer, whose career began when he was still a teenager. His father, Rafael Roos, owned the reputable Foto Roos studio.

Roos’ career as a photojournalist and documentary photographer was short, but exceptional. He was conscious of his social responsibility as a photographer and thought about the potential for making an impact through pictures as early as the 1950s, long before social awareness became the mainstream in photography at the start of the 1970s. He photographed people’s everyday lives in the streets of Helsinki and Sicily. In Sicily in 1959, Roos’ photographic narrative crystallized into decisive moments, in which the composition of the picture became a part of psychologically acute observation of the moment. Roos also took sensitive portraits of the Marimekko clothes designed by Vuokko Nurmesniemi set in the heart of nature.

In the 1950s, Roos photographed the material for two large photography books. He was one of the first photographers in Finland to adopt the book as his own chosen channel of expression. The book shot in Sicily was never published, although its original printing plan can be seen in the exhibition. Already before then, he had managed to photograph the most exciting city book of the post-war period (Ihmisten Helsinki [the human face of Helsinki], 1961) in his home district in Helsinki.

This exhibition based on the Museum’s own research project is showing Roos’ documentary in the original prints, accompanied by new prints of his fashion photographs. The pictures can be seen in their original published contexts, too, in the pages of magazines and newspapers. The museum is also showing the short films that Roos shot of Helsinki and the Triennale di Milano.

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication of a book, K-G Roos 1937–1976 (in Finnish, ed. Maria Faarinen, Finnish Museum of Photography 2012).

On the Museum’s Kännykkäguide (mobile phone guide) visitors can hear K-G Roos’ brother Mats Roos, his childhood friend, author Jörn Donner, textile designer Vuokko Nurmesniemi, and Curator, Collections Maria Faarinen, who has researched Roos’ production, talk (in Finnish) about Roos and his work.

Curator, Collections Maria Faarinen will introduce the exhibition at 18:00 on 14.3. Museum entrance fee.

East–West battle

24.2.–25.3.2012, Process Space

Press briefing on Thursday 23.2. at 11:00. Opening 23.2. at 17-19. Welcome!

Press photo

How equal does Helsinki look? Is it obvious that people in Kuusisaari and Lehtisaari earn eight times as much as people in Kivikko? Is Pitkäsilta Bridge still the great dividing line between Helsinki's citizens?

Juuso Westerlund: East-West, (2011)

Participants in a workshop run by the Photo Do organization for professional photographers took on common themes to photograph the present-day realities of eastern and western Helsinki. They had five days. What did Helsinki look like in that week in February? The results are on display at the Finnish Museum of Photography. The team that took photographs in Western Helsinki comprised photographers Julius Koivistoinen, Alli Ikonen, Peter Forsgård, Miikka Pirinen, Touko Hujanen, Hanna Anttila and Rami Lappalainen. This is how team leader Sami Kero describes his Helsinki-ite identity:  I am a 33-year-old press photographer. I am originally from Kesälahti, a small village in Eastern Finland, but is there anything more urban than an ex-country boy? Like many others who arrived by train, I visualize the metropolitan Helsinki region via Helsinki's city centre.

The team that took photographs in Eastern Helsinki comprised photographers Vera Ruokonen, Marko Oikarinen, Markus Sommers, Ditte Uljas, Aleksi Poutanen and Noora Sandgren. This is how team leader Juuso Westerlund describes his Helsinki-ite identity:  I am a Helsinki-ite photographer to my bone marrow, whose one sin has been to live the first years of his life in Meilahti (in Western Helsinki). I love suburbs, 1970s shopping malls, sawdust tracks through the forest, karaoke bars, side-buttoned 1980s tracksuits, Tallinnanaukio Square, the Metro, nasal-accented teenagers, joggers, saunas, shell suits, woods with people drinking beer from plastic bags, rowdy drunks, and the Jokerit (Jokers) ice hockey club. Eastern Helsinki is real people and a feisty attitude.

Photo Do is an active organization for everyone interested in photography and visual culture. Its main focus is on documentary photography.www.photodo.org

The exhibition and workshop are a part of the Helsinki Photography Biennial 2012 program. www.hpb.fi. The theme for HPB12 is urbanity.

More information about Photo Do`s workshop: Hannamari Shakya, p. 044 524 7557

Meet the Artists: Wed 21.3 at 18-19. Free entrance.

Octavian Bâlea: Flexi-in-security Redux

24.2–25.3.2012, Project Space

Press briefing on Thursday 23.2. at 11:00. Opening 23.2. at 17–19. The artist will be present. Welcome!

Press photos

What is happening to the European workforce in the middle of the economic crisis?

Octavian Bâlea’s (b. 1984) picture series is about people hit by unemployment and about a deserted village. He investigates the changes in the lives of the local community in a city in Germany, from where the jobs provided by the Nokia factory are disappearing, and in a dwindling village in Romania, where all the villagers of working age have left for the new factory.

Octavian Bâlea: Coffee with Ahmed

In 2010, Bâlea photographed the members of an Islamic community in Bochum, Germany. When the factory moved away, it left behind it unemployment and a transformed everyday life. He photographed the Romanian village of Rachis in Transylvania as a deserted ghost town in the aftermath of the mass exodus.

Bâlea returned to Rachis for a second photographing trip in 2011. By then, the village population had dropped to five. The ten-kilometre journey to Rachis wound through the forest, led by a guide carrying an axe in case of wolves. Bâlea recorded the residents in this decaying medieval settlement, as they remembered the past and waited for the end.

The Project had its beginnings when Bâlea took part in the Flexi-in-security project, in which ten journalist-photographer pairs were sent out to investigate what was happening to the European workforce in the midst of economic crisis. Bâlea worked with the journalist Georgiana Macovei, whose writings will be displayed at the exhibition to complement the story told by the pictures.

Meet the artist: (in English) Sunday 11.3. at 14–15. Museum entrance fee.

Kalle Hamm & Dzamil Kamanger: On Freedom

20.1.-19.2.2011, Project Space

Press conference Thursday 19.1.2011 at 11:00. The artists will be present. Welcome!

Press photos

The artist duo Hamm-Kamanger met in 1998 in a Helsinki kebab-pizzeria where they were both working. Alongside their work it occurred to them to carry out a joint art project, which was shown at Kunsthalle Helsinki in the year 2000. They have worked as a duo ever since.

Dzamil Kamanger: Prison Sheet (2011)

Dzamil Kamanger’s Prison Sheet is an enlargement embroidered in Mouliné stranded cotton of a photograph taken by the Red Cross. This picture of Kamanger and his fellow prisoners in Iraq's, Al-Romadi's prison was sent to Kamanger’s relatives to show them he was alive. The work replicating the photograph has been embroidered, using a slow, laborious technique, with feelings that were not dealt with during his ten years in prison, feelings that this civilian prisoner of the Iraq-Iran War still carries with him.

Kamanger has staged performances in which he sewed Prison Sheet in front of the display windows of Europe’s designer stores. He says that Europe casts a spell with its affluence and luxury goods, but that the everyday life of a refugee is often an arduous slog to eke out even the most meagre living. Kamanger’s works bring together his personal experiences in his home country of Iran and later as a refugee in Finland to produce something positive, along with dreams of a better future.

Kalle Hamm’s 80 Comments on Freedom, as its name implies, consists of 80 comments that speak about the history and development of individual freedom and citizens’ rights, from the Enlightenment up to the present day. The artist questions how well equal rights between different groups have been applied in practice. For him, one thing that makes promoting rights less easy is the fact that capitalism turns the slogans of the Enlightenment into rhetoric. Economic thinking has also transformed the symbols of the Enlightenment into mass-produced goods, diverting people’s attention away from unfulfilled promises and towards consumerism.

 Meet the artists: Wed 1.2. at 6pm. Museum entrance fee.