PENTTI SAMMALLAHTI: RETROSPECTIVE

15.9.2010-27.2.2011

Press conference Tuesday 14.9. at 11:00, exhibition opening 18-20

Pentti Sammallahti will be present at both. Welcome!

PRESSPHOTOS

The autumn of 2010 is dedicated to a major exhibition of the life's work of Pentti Sammallahti (b. 1950). Sammallahti is a master of classical black-and-white photography and a pioneer of Finnish photographic art.

Pentti Sammallahti: Solovki, White Sea, Russia 1992

Sammallahti's photographs take the viewer beyond everyday experience into a wistfully enchanting world. Regardless of where on the globe Sammallahti goes - Finland, Russia or France - there is a gentle humour in his gaze. In Sammallahti's universe things that are considered unimportant become significant, while the essentials are discovered through acutely experiencing the world. Dogs stretching and doves dozing, the rhythms of a Roma market, or children in clothes that are too big for them - all well-aimed shots in the hunt for decisive moments. Sammallahti represents an alternative to the frenetic rhythms of contemporary life and to the adulation of rapid change

Apart from being a world-travelling photographer, Sammallahti is an immortalizer of his home city of Helsinki. Although the place has changed and grown over the decades, Helsinki-ites will recognize in these pictures the dampness, the wind and the mist coming in from the sea that are part of the scene in autumn and winter.

Pentti Sammallahti: Ristisaari, Finland 1974

Sammallahti is one of the first Finnish photographers to have carried out his entire life's work as a photographic artist. As a craftsman who emphasizes the knowledge and skill of the photographer in taking photographs, making photographic prints, and printing photographs using photomechanical processes. Along with individual pictures, Sammallahti has made thematic portfolios. His breakthrough work, Cathleen Ní Houlihan - An Irish Portfolio from 1979, took its name from a figure in an Irish folk tale. It marked a new opening for photographic art that accentuated the tonality of the pictures and the photographer's own inner experience. He taught for a long time at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, where he and his workgroups created a culture of high-quality photographic printing and printing using photomechanical processes. The retrospective exhibition includes his original photographic prints and graphically printed portfolios.

Sammallahti is one of the internationally most prominent Finnish photographers and a multiple prize-winner in his home country. In 2004, one of the world's most famous photographers, the Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson, ranked Sammallahti among his 100 favourite photographers for his Foundation's inaugural exhibition in Paris.

Sami Parkkinen: Paradise,

Project Space, 15.9-31.10.2010

Press conference Tuesday 14.9. at 11:00, exhibition opening 18-20.

Sami Parkkinen will be present at both. Welcome!

PRESSPHOTOS

The photographic artist Sami Parkkinen's (b. 1974) Paradise photograph series records his life in pictures over a period of a year. The series is about depression and recovery from it.

In 2008, Sami Parkkinen (b. 1974) became ill with severe depression. The depressed person loses the desire to do things, nothing seems to have any meaning. Even though taking pictures was a great effort, for the next year, Parkkinen documented his life in diary-like photographs.

Sami Parkkinen: From the Series Paradise (2008-2010)

He thought about what makes us unhappy and what constitutes a good life. Parkkinen thinks we live in a hurried world with too many possibilities, with happiness and this hurried world existing in mutual conflict. We lose our sense of community and forget those close to us, becoming stressed animals pacing back and forth in a cage. "In many ways, we have become greedy and selfish. Do we want more from life than it can give us? We actually have nothing except this moment, and our own presence," Parkkinen says.

Sami Parkkinen: From the Series Paradise (2008-2010)

These pictures had their beginnings in a serious subject, but they also contain colour and black humour. The exhibition speaks about the healing power of photography. For Parkkinen, taking the pictures in the Paradise series was a way of coping. He hopes these photographs will inspire other people to make their own pictorial diaries, and reduce the barriers to talking about depression.

Annu Kekäläinen: Refugee City - Tales from Kakuma Camp

Process Space 15.9-17.10. 2010
Press conference Tuesday 14.9. at 11:00, exhibition opening 18-20.
Annu Kekäläinen will be present at both. Welcome!

PRESSPHOTOS

Annu Kekäläinen: Evelyn and Stella, Sudan

"The snake's open jaws reached from the ground to the top of that tree. The whole village walked inside. Then the snake closed its mouth." Yom, Sudan

The writer and journalist Annu Kekäläinen's exhibition is about the originally temporary Kakuma refugee camp, which now provides a permanent home for more than 60,000 people. In this camp in Northern Kenya Kekäläinen encountered a strange world with its own ways of doing things. She lived in Kakuma for three months, criss-crossing the eighty-square-kilometre area by bicycle: interviewing, researching, observing and collecting material for her documentary book about this multi-cultural city in the desert.

The Refugee City exhibition uses grotesque and poetic landscape-images and portraits to tell about the lives of the people in Kenya's Kakuma refugee camp and those of the local indigenous people, the Turkana herders. The refugee-camp residents share their living environment with the herders, making clashes inevitable. In the exhibition we can hear the herders' singing, read about the refugees' experiences, and see into the world of the refugee camp with the aid of projected images and photographs.

In the neighbourhood of Kakuma Kekäläinen encountered not only the harshest world she has ever known, but also the most beautiful and the saddest landscape she has ever seen: "The perpetually shining sun paints the sky a bright blue, the fleecy clouds lick the sharply outlined tops of the hills, the savannah grasslands have been burned silver, the local clay glows ochre. Shrivelled arms of rivers wound around the roots of the hedgerows".

Kekäläinen's documentary book "Leiri - tarinoita ihmisistä jotka haluavat kotiin" ("The Camp - Tales of People Who Want To Go Home") is published this autumn.