Milla-Kariina Oja
He said we’d met in space and suggested we travel back together
7 February – 1 March 2020
Milla-Kariina Oja’s exhibition He said we’d met in space and suggested we travel back together is a two-channel spatial video installation, centred on a man and a woman who seem to have been inserted into this multidimensional cinematic world.
Turning the camera back onto herself, the artist has constructed the film intuitively, leaving room for chance and the accidental. To be in the world is apparently to be on the brink of absurdity. The difference between real and choreographed, natural and unnatural, is not always clear. The work stems from a desire to understand the differences between our perceptions, our experiences of the world and our image of reality. What happens to our worlds when we encounter another?
Nature plays a key role, setting the boundaries that enable our very existence, both as nature and in nature. In turn, as human beings our presence – at once fragile and dominant – inevitably affects the environment.
The work was largely filmed in the Norwegian mountains in collaboration with cinematographer Mika Mattila. Mattila also appears in the work. The sound designer is Pertti Venetjoki.
The project was supported by The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture AVEK, The VISEK Centre for the Promotion of Visual Art and Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
Milla-Kariina Oja (b. 1976, Oulu) lives and works in Helsinki. Oja graduated from the department of art at Manchester Metropolitan University in 1999. She continued her studies in a fine arts PhD program at the University of Barcelona until 2002. She lived and worked in Barcelona for seven years, until moving to Beijing in 2006.
Milla-Kariina Oja’s work navigates between photography and video. Recently she has worked with multichannel video installations that often include performative elements. Oja’s works have been exhibited in galleries, art centres and museums in Europe and China, including a solo exhibition at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing, which is one of the leading centres for photography and video art in China. Her previous solo exhibition, Parallel Interiors, was exhibited at Jiali Gallery in Beijing, at Photographic Centre Peri in Turku and at Photographic Gallery Hippolyte in Helsinki (2015). Oja was one of the artists of the Turku Biennial 2015 at The Museum of History and Contemporary Art, Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova.
www.millakariinaoja.com
millakariina(a)gmail.com
+358415508976
