Utu-Tuuli Jussila, Härmä / Hoar
Jarno Parkkima, Hämärä (Twilight)
5.8.–28.8.2022
Tue-Sun 12-18 (on other times by appointment)
opening Thu 4.8. 17–20. Welcome!
When the mind and its ideas slide into the background, actions and the immediate relationship with the environment remain. Oksasenkatu 11’s August exhibition presents Utu-Tuuli Jussila’s photographic series Härmä / Hoar and Jarno Parkkima’s video work Hämärä (Twilight). Repetition and pausing to observe a slow change combine the works.
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Utu-Tuuli Jussila, Härmä / Hoar
My grandmother lived to be 94 years old (1925–2019). She wished to live also the last years of her life alone in her home in Ylihärmä in South Ostrobothnia, kilometres away from the nearest town.
She had early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, which is why she occasionally imagined that strangers visited the yard or the basement. A motion-sensing surveillance camera was installed to ensure that the intruders would be detected. Eventually the camera ended up monitoring my grandmother instead.
The surveillance camera images form the material for this series. In them, my grandmother does repetitive yard work in the twilight of her life until she no longer appears in the pictures. The yard, however, is not emptied, but life after human presence continues.
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Jarno Parkkima, Hämärä (Twilight)
”It ain’t yet night nor dark. Daylight’s direct and demanding brightness has faded. In twilight, I’m surrounded by the constant flowing change of light, atmosphere and beings. Some kind of living silence. Twilight allows room for my being and my nature: I can be a bit of one and another. Restlessness breaks and I melt into this nocturnal mass where all feels to be right - without forcing. In here and now all the fatigue, inability and being in wrongful-manner feels like absurd experiences.
When I’m thinking too much, I’m unable to be. This work has been an attempt to let go of the weight of a mind that seeks absolute definitions and understanding. Without cease, I named everything (even though language is so fluctuating). As if making images. In daylight, characters come across as bold, poignant, blinding and burning, yet their living and being submits to and hides from the light and mind (one should joy that nothing can be grasped).
In twilight, I sense and I see more and almost, as if beyond all that’s visible… I’ve read that ”as the outlines, the contours disappear into the darkness of the evening, one feels the presence of something that is both here and absent, and which can neither be named nor denied”.
I know people who feel that they belong to twilight and who, after a long silence, have learned to speak and love language again - the uncertain words, sentences and images. Open like a question or a poem.”
Each scene in this work of moving image is a long-running recording of twilight’s moments after sunset. Tens and tens of scenes have been recorded during the past year, for this, some have been selected. Some of the sites and sights are consequences of wandering and chance, some are sought and desired.
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The exhibition was supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland and Oskar Öflunds Stiftelse sr.
The gallery space is not wheelchair accessible. From the street level, there are four steps of stairs down to the ground level of the gallery. The basement space of the gallery has a narrow spiral staircase. The gallery has a gender-neutral toilet. There are seats available for visitors on both floors. There is no designated quiet space. There are no strong fragrances in the space.