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.
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.
2000 & 11 SELF-PORTRAITS
16.12.2011–5.2.2012, Process space
Press photos
The 2000 & 11 SELF-PORTRAITS capital-of-culture project, run by staff of the Fine Arts programme of the Arts Academy at Turku University of Applied Sciences, arrives in Helsinki. A hundred Turku residents made more than two thousand self-portraits in workshops run by Finnish and international artists. This exhibition comprising an enormous number of works is being shown in the Finnish Museum of Photography’s Process Space.
Hertta Kiiski: Una, 2010
The self-portraits were made when, starting in September 2009, Turku residents participating in the workshops took up the pen, paper, brush and camera. The result is images of the real, living individuals that surround us, as well as an image of our times in capital-of-culture year 2011.
The exhibition at the Finnish Museum of Photography is showing a cross-section of the highlights of the 2000 & 11 SELF-PORTRAITS project and of the rich variety of self-portrait methods. “The self-portrait is powerfully present in our time. Self-portraits are written about, various self-portrait methods are being developed, the self-portrait is being studied, and contemporary artists are making self-portraits. The 2000 & 11 SELF-PORTRAITS project shows how a self-portrait can, for instance, be idealised, therapeutic, autobiographical, confessional or fictive. We can use self-portraits in many different ways. The self-portrait belongs to all of us,” says project curator Taina Erävaara. The leader of the project’s photography workshops, Vesa Aaltonen, sees potential for the self-portrait as an interpreter of long-term changes: “A self-portrait can be a tool for examining shifting identity.”
Press copies of Omakuva on jokaisen kuva (a self-portrait is everyone’s portrait) will be available at the press conference. This book deals with the methods used in the project and with various artist’s and researcher’s views on the self-portrait.
The 2000 & 11 SELF-PORTRAITS project has been curated by Taina Erävaara and run by staff of the Fine Arts programme of the Arts Academy at Turku University of Applied Sciences. The working-group members are Vesa Aaltonen, Pia Bartsch, Kaisa Lehto and Ilona Tanskanen.
Meet the artists on Sunday 5.2.2012 at 3pm.
Entrance to the exhibition is free.
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