Placelessness
Paikattomuus
11.3. – 29.3.2009
Galleria Huuto Uudenmaankatu
”We may distinguish between two types of imaginative process: the one that starts with the word and arrives at the visual image, and the one that starts with the visual image and arrives at its verbal expression.”
Italo Calvino
My exhibition Placelessness consists of textual works and photographs that discuss place, presence, and the passing of time. The basis of my works is an observation of an object – but how to present, with a still photograph, something that is abstract, invisible, or in constant change? Change is built-in in a place. My attempt is to grasp places by presenting them as pictures turned into words; as stories; as photographs. In the works in the exhibition, places resemble one another; they are presented as absent or removed; or they are just referred to. The name of the exhibition includes wistfulness about the impossibility of sharing experiences of existence and, on the other hand, a dream of change and of sharing it.
n my artistic work, I aim at combining the verbal and the visual. Typically, a photograph captures the uniqueness of the moment and the subject. A photograph is a picture of a certain target at a certain moment. Laconic words, for one, escape the uniqueness of the picture and make a certain window into any window or all of them. The use of text in my works is an attempt to resurrect a still picture. Reading words and text happens in the present, and their definitions exist at the moment of reading. As an interpreter, I knowingly face the impossible when trying to verbalize visual information. There is a break, a crack, between the visual and the verbal. Obviously, everything cannot be verbalized, and the tale is constantly doomed to being unfinished.
The basis for the work Talo (“House”) is a photograph in which the visual information has been replaced by individual words. My attempt is to restore the rough entity, to observe accurately. A roof, a wall, a bush, a window. Words describe what is beyond sight. The original picture has been abstracted into words floating in the air. There are no clear entities in the picture, just pieces of which one tries to compile something. By the words pictures, every viewer becomes an active producer of definitions, and the distance between doing and watching becomes shorter. The pictures flee from a single certain, right interpretation, summary, or answer.
In the exhibition, the places seem to be neither here nor there. The works are presented as sketches of themselves, undefined, unfinished. Places are not located.
Additional info and press photos: Noomi Ljungdell, tel. +358505258572, noomi(at)noomiljungdell.com
