Joonas Hyvönen - Bog Body

3.1.2019 – 27.1.2019

Opening & New Year’s Celebration: 31.12.2018, 7pm-12pm, warmly welcome!
Open
Thu–Fri 14–18
Sat–Sun 12–18

It’s weird for sure, I’d be the first to admit that. I seem to have died, but it really makes no sense. I’m sure it was just last week when I read of the so-called bog people, bodies naturally preserved in peat bogs, but never did I imagine I’d find such a bog here in Finland, even less falling into one.

Yet here I am, body turning cold, moving layer by layer deeper into the bog, but even more weird: still thinking and feeling. Some things have changed though, as the mud, soil and swamp water seep into my neurons. As the temperature in my body now mirrors the cold outside it, I start to perceive plastic bags, cigarette stumps, wreckages of cars and home appliances – and a bit further, outside my immediate perception, I somehow smell cadavers of animals, perhaps even human bodies too, and it feels as if I can share their memories of the past.

Past, present and bodies, as all things muddle up in the bog, but no story of a bog body is complete without an excavation.

Joonas Hyvönen (b.1990) lives and works in Helsinki. He’s shown works in Finland and abroad. The past year Joonas has spent in the Jan van Eyck Academie residency in the Netherlands. Bog Body is his first solo exhibition.

http://joonashyvonen.com/