Past exhibitions

When the artists Hannele Rantala and Milja Laurila are making A Room of One’s Own in the museum’s Project Space, they will be creating installations there that deal with limited space, individual autonomy and livelihood, and artistic work.

Was the Estonian-born J.J. Reinberg (1823–1896) Finland’s first photographic artist? Reinberg’s touching portraits and landscapes open up a view of the Turku of 150 years ago. In these old, salted-paper prints we feel the presence of a different time and society, when the gentry and bourgeoisie,…

The name of the exhibition refers to Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in which a girl falls down a rabbit hole and ends up in strange places. Like the book, the exhibition moves from depictions of everyday life to fantasy worlds created or presented by the artists, and life is manifested as a ceaseless wavering on the borderline between these two domains.

What does a city look like to a homeless person? Where can you rest, eat or go for a wash? Once your basic needs have been met, what else do you have the energy to notice? And what does it feel like to move from the street into your own home? The seven individual series of pictures in the exhibition in the Process space give us some idea.

Ulla Jokisalo (b. 1955) fills the Finnish Museum of Photography with her photographic works, unique paper cut-outs, needle punctures and embroidery. Object assemblages installed between the picture collages by the artist herself create their own narratives.

When a daughter and mother want to get to know each other better, swapping clothes can help. Photographic artist Kristiina Männikkö contemplates her own relationship with her mother in the series Katse (The Gaze). Looking out of the portrait photographs are the artist in her mother’s clothes and the mother in her daughter’s surroundings.

The Finnish Museum of Photography houses a substantial collection, one that can sometimes surprize even the museum’s own staff with its variety. Gems from this cornucopia of images can now be seen in the Museum’s Process Space.

What does a ladybird see? What kind of photographs would a mole take? How would you like to see the world through an elk's eyes? Tuula Närhinen (b. 1967) built pinhole cameras with mechanisms that resemble the construction and function of various animals' eyes. She then set up the cameras in places…

Clothes make the man - but what about the child? Visual artist Heidi Lunabba's (b. 1977) series of pictures investigates how clothes and other visual emblems are used to accentuate and define a child's gender. Each child at a workshop has been photographed as both a girl and a boy, and the two pictures have been digitally merged into a single image to make "twins".

Johanna Heldebro’s (b. 1982) often uncomfortably personal work explores notions of obsession, photographic representation and personal boundaries.

In her exhibition Fransson contemplates fashion-store display windows, both as a visual phenomenon and as part of the cultural history of consumerism. The windows are like theatre sets or cinema screens, in which the objects shine in the spotlights. Like a theatre performance, in order to have…

Before or after seeing the exhibition in Turku, its atmosphere can also be experienced in the Finnish Museum of Photography's Process Space, which has been turned into a comfortable Alice in Wonderland living room.

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…

In the pictures in the exhibition the rules of everyday life are broken, with strange juxtapositions and familiar objects used in disruptive ways. A human body and a broom, a hanger or cutlery are given new roles in relation to one another. The very existence of the artist, who appears as herself…

"When I became friends with the models, I realized that documenting the physical changes was not enough to show the pressures involved in the process, pressures that society places on transgender people. Transgender people are born physically in an in-between state, and in seeking a complete life…

The Zapatistas hide their faces with commando-style ski masks. These "pasamontañas", originally used for reasons of security, have become the Zapatistas's symbol and trademark. The exhibition turns our gaze to our own society and, for example, to the state of civil society.

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.

"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 Refugee City exhibition uses grotesque and poetic landscape-images and portraits to tell about the lives of the people in Kenya's Kakuma…

"I was sitting on a train on my way home, and listening to music. The words of a child sitting behind me penetrated through the music. She was saying how, nowadays, it is nice to go home from the children's home for the weekend, since mummy no longer throws her against the wall."

The exhibition at the Finnish Museum of Photography offers the first extensive overview of the Harvesters'photographs, which were created in the face of the intense headwind blowing from the left-wing artworld. The Harvesters group's photographs also allow us to view writing about the history of Finnish photography in a new light.

Between 2006 and 2009, Ann Pelanne made several visits to quiet little village, and to the premises of what used to be Kellokoski Ironworks, to take photographs. These trips were made in different years and different seasons. The result was Mariefors Blues, the artist's interpretation of the…

"There is almost no summer night in the north; only a lingering evening, darkening slightly as it lingers, but even this darkening has its ineffable clarity." Thus begins F.E. Sillanpää's novel Ihmiset suviyössä (1934, quotation from People in the Summer Night, transl. by Alan Blair, 1966). The…

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.

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.

Art-photography students from the Aalto University School of Art and Design collected Finnish people's memories of Paris. With these memories as their research material, they used their cameras to record their own interpretations. The result is a pictorial travelogue from various corners of this…

The Take a Peep exhibition focuses on children as camera users, who have a right to their own ways of expressing themselves and of making pictures. In the workshops the children have taken a peep through the camera's viewfinder - at themselves, at each other and at their surroundings - and taken…

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.

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.

The exhibition From Misty Morning to Composition presents an unparalleled overview of Finnish post-war art photography, mainly from the 1950s. Most of the artworks are from the collections of the Finnish Museum of Photography. Lost key pieces have been recovered, and some of the destroyed works have been re-proofed. The overview is based on the research by Leena Saraste, the curator of this exhibition, and architect Kirsti Kasnio’s visual design.