Susanna Kesänen
Forward/Rewind
21.6. – 14.7.2019
When I was young, I collected postcards with pictures of horses and attached them to my wardrobe door with Blu Tack. I flattened foil candy wrappers by pressing them against the table with my finger, then rolled them into little tubes and made rings from them. “Memories is what we are,” says Nick Cave in a film. I read my old diaries and wonder if I really once was that person who wrote them.
I travel between a house in the countryside and an apartment in the city. Having moved into the city from elsewhere, I can never fully get into the urban lifestyle. However, I am hardly seen as one of the country people either because I only go there for short visits.
I think about the relationship between time and place and how it has affected my identity. It has been shaped by childhood places, the countryside and moving into the city. I find the postcards in the drawer of my old desk, neatly organized in a folder. I draw them on paper with a pencil. I would like to linger on the pictures for a long time. I go through my great-aunt’s stuff and photographs in my family’s house. I trace portraits, creating blue line drawings in a graph ruled notebook. I make random entries in a diary by writing and photographing. I cut hands from newspaper pictures and group together those that look similar. I make changes, I combine and redo things. Little by little the horse postcards, enlarged with a pencil, lose their connection to that moment in time linked to the photograph.
Susanna Kesänen (b. 1983) is a Helsinki-based visual artist. In 2017, she earned her Master of Arts degree from the department of photography at Aalto University. Kesänen’s most recent exhibition, The Green House, was on display at the Photographic Centre Peri in Turku (2018) and at the Photographic Gallery Hippolyte Studio in Helsinki (2017). This exhibition continues with the themes of The Green House, the need to belong somewhere and the constant sense of detachment. The exhibition also examines why the passing of time and one’s own recent history are sometimes so difficult to perceive.
