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Susanna Majuri: The Water Researcher's Daughter27.1- 23.5. 2010
Press conference Tuesday, 26.1 at 11:00, exhibition opening 18-20. The Water Researcher's Daughter is photographic artist Susanna Majuri's (b. 1978) first large solo exhibition in Finland. Her fairy-tale-like photographs have already attracted attention in New York, St Petersburg, Tokyo, Reykjavik and elsewhere. The show includes Majuri's earlier photographs along with totally new works made for the exhibition: Kultakolikot /Treasure (2009), Lumikettu /Arctic Fox (2009) and Vesiputous /Waterfall (2009). "My new pictures give me a childish euphoria: I'm writing in a language that I can't even read yet!" Majuri says. In recent years, water has become an even more central element in Susanna Majuri's pictures. It is both a symbol and a protective, revelatory space, in which things such as sisterhood, friendship and erotic love between girls become possible. In her latest pictures the figures move around in underwater landscapes. Items such as a chocolate box found at a flea market with a flock of ducks that has just taken flight on its lid, or the wall of a Russian museum in winter have become the background landscapes to the photographs. Majuri has the pictures made into enormous wax cloths, up to six-metre-wide, which she then places at the bottom of a swimming pool. Her models dive down into the water in front of the cloth. Majuri says she discovered water when she was looking for colours: "Colours contain subtle hints and you have to be humble with them. When I look really carefully, a colour can speak to me and ask me to construct a stage for it." The locations for Majuri's photographs have often been found in Iceland, Norway, the Faeroe Islands or Sweden. The photographer invites unknown, local people to be the models in her pictures. Even though the places photographed are recognizably Nordic, in Majuri's photographs Nordicness is more than just a matter of geography. The colours create routes through the places. The way is also signposted in the works' titles, frequently in the language of the country where the photographs were taken. The translations of the titles are significant: they may try to say the same thing as the original or to tell another story in another language. Many of Susanna Majuri's pictures have had their beginnings in music, fairy tales and stories. One of the earliest works in the exhibition, Sun Set River (2002), is a response to PJ Harvey's The River (2001). In the song, the river takes away all pain and brings release. Meanwhile, in Mykines (2007) a white figure vanishes into whiteness - or emerges out of whiteness - depending on the attention and tenderness she receives, just like the invisible child in Tove Jansson's book. Grimm's fairytale The Star Money inspired the photographer to make Untitled (2007). In the fairytale a poor girl gives even her last item of clothing to a freezing-cold child and is left naked in the falling snow, which turns into silver coins. Susanna Majuri is a graduate of Turku Arts Academy and the University of Art and Design Helsinki. She is represented by Galerie Adler of New York and Frankfurt. Majuri's works have also frequently been shown in exhibitions of the University of Art and Design Helsinki's The Helsinki School group. Majuri took the cover for Finnish rock band PMMP's album Veden varaan (By water). Susanna Majuri presents her exhibition (in Finnish) Sun 7.2. 2 pm and Sun 16.5. 2 pm. Museum entrance fee. Further information on the exhibition: Further information on workshops, guided tours and supplementary program Guided tours
--------------------------------- Antero Takala: Mindscapes 1960-201027.1-23.5.2010
Antero Takala: Marraskuun pakkasaamu, 1999 Exhibition press conference, Tuesday, 26.1 at 11, and opening at 18-20. "Photographing the landscape is like portrait photography. In both, the essential thing is to capture the subject's personality. In a portrait, the eyes are an essential part of the personality. In landscape photography, the clouds are the eyes of the landscape. [...] This is not documentation of the landscape itself, but of my own mental landscape." Mindscapes 1960 - 2010 is a retrospective view of the 50-year oeuvre of photographic artist Professor Antero Takala (b.1939). The hundred-plus photographs now being shown together for the first time form a black-and-white landscape study; a paean to Finnish nature, to northern light, to lake landscapes, and to Lapland. The exhibition also includes a series of portrait studies of Finnish stage actors from the 1960s. Antero Takala's portrait studies of Finnish stage actors from the 1960s. At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, Takala was the first Finnish photographer to investigate the use of photography as a means of expression in television. The exhibition includes two major works of experimental film and video art, Romeo and Juliet (1972) and The Courtyard (1980), which belong to the Finnish Museum of Photography's collection. Also on display is the 1972 Photoshop, i.e. "the video colouring agent" created in YLE's (the Finnish Broadcasting Company) design laboratory. Antero Takala's Romeo and Juliet Antero Takala began working as a TV cameraman at YLE in 1960. He retired from YLE as a Head Cameraman in 2002. Takala was one of the founders of the Imago 6 group in 1966. He was awarded the State Prize for Photographic Art in 1967 and in 1973. In 1997, he was given the honorary title of Professor. Takala says that, after the Mindscapes 1960-2010 retrospective, he will continue studying light and the landscape, and aiming for the impossible, i.e. total mastery of natural light and the landscape of the mind. Meet the Artist Further information on the exhibition:
-------------------------- Lucia Ganieva: Ermitazhniki - Museum AttendantsProjekt space 27.1.-21.3.2010
Press conference Tuesday, 26.1. at 11:00, exhibition opening 18-20. The Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg houses an untold number of artworks, which are guarded by a large band of museum attendants. Russian/Dutch photographer Lucia Ganieva's (b.1968) exhibition Ermitazhniki - Museum Attendants is a tribute to these quiet workers of the Hermitage, and to their knowledge of art. In her portraits Lucia Ganieva has elevated the Hermitage's gallery attendants to stand alongside famous paintings. As the background to the portraits, Ganieva chose works from the Hermitage's collection that she thought communicated in some way with the attendants. The portraits in the Ermitazhniki - Museum Attendants exhibition are from 2006-2007. Lucia Ganieva lives and works in Amsterdam. She graduated from the Fotoacademie in Amsterdam in 2007. Ganieva has participated in numerous international exhibitions and her pictures have been published widely. During her visit to Finland, Lucia Ganieva will meet students from the Finnish-Russian School. Guided tours Further exhibition details: ---------------------------------
Atelieri O. HaapalaProcess 27.1-21.3.2010
The exhibition press conference is on Tuesday, 26.1 at 11, and the opening at 18-20. The artists will be present at both events. Welcome! Atelieri O. Haapala's photography exhibition revives portrait traditions that are over a hundred years old. The show offers nostalgia and extravagant costumes, the charm of the bourgeoisie, but also opium-fumed, decadent vices. The touring photographic studio has immortalized its clients in 19th-century spirit. The result is a fine collection of modern cabinet portraits. Alongside the neo-Victorian portraits, the Finnish Museum of Photography's exhibition includes photographic apparatus that matches the spirit of the age, a hand-painted landscape backdrop, and other photographic props. All this, plus a suite of works about the life of the owner of the photographic studio Frau Onyxei Haapala and her faithful assistant Helmut, in which the working duo travel from the shores of the Arctic Ocean, via a pulmonary-tuberculosis sanatorium, to the pyramids of Giza. Atelieri O. Haapala is a performative art project created collaboratively by two photographers, Saara Salmi and Marco Melander. Onyxei and Helmut are their role figures at photography events. The photographers, disguised in a false moustache and corsets, spent over a year appearing at Helsinki's Night of the Arts, burlesque events, art museums and vintage sales, and elsewhere. Clients have come to be photographed in their own clothes or in a manner more in tune with the spirit of the endeavour, in borrowed costumes. The idea of living out the parts and performing has been to give the public some of the atmosphere of a lost world, an imaginary moment in time, a moment when being photographed was a special and much-awaited event. The project has been supported by the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland. Further information on the exhibition: Further information on workshops, guided tours and supplementary program Guided tours VIP opening for people who have appeared in Atelieri O. Haapala's photographs: Sun 7.2 at 14-16 and Fri 12.2 at 18-20. Free entry. Atelieri O. Haapala photographs portraits at the museum: Sun 7.2 at 14-16 and Sun 21.3 at 11-17. Free entry. The exhibition is accompanied by workshops for day-care centres and schools. Further details: www.valokuvataiteenmuseo.fi or Educational Curator Erja Salo,
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Susanna Majuri: Kultakolikot / Gold mynt / Treasure, 2009
Lucia Ganieva: Nikitina, Ludmila Alekseevna, 2005-2006
Atelieri O. Haapala, 2009
