Past exhibitions

Strange Love focuses on photographic artist Timo Kelaranta’s (b. 1951) long involvement with photography. As a photographer Kelaranta is a poet, a master of the abstract image and of minimalism, for whom the most important thing in a picture is its form.

In various workshops and independent photography projects, young people have used photographs and videos to investigate and open up their own experiences of Helsinki and their own districts of the city, including Ruoholahti, Kontula and other parts of Eastern Helsinki and the city centre.

In this fifth exhibition by the Kollective group, which began on the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts’ Time and Space Arts study programme, the various works conduct a mutual dialogue. Here taking photographs also becomes a performative gesture, and pictures turn into multi-layered stories.

Participants in a workshop run by the Photo Do organization for professional photographers took on common themes to photograph the present-day realities of eastern and western Helsinki. They had five days. What did Helsinki look like in that week in February? The results are on display at the Finnish Museum of Photography.

What is happening to the European workforce in the middle of the economic crisis? Octavian Bâlea’s (b. 1984) picture series is about people hit by unemployment and about a deserted village. He investigates the changes in the lives of the local community in a city in Germany, from where the jobs provided by the Nokia factory are disappearing, and in a dwindling village in Romania, where all the villagers of working age have left for the new factory.

The artist duo Hamm-Kamanger met in 1998 in a Helsinki kebab-pizzeria where they were both working. Alongside their work it occurred to them to carry out a joint art project, which was shown at Kunsthalle Helsinki in the year 2000.

A hundred Turku residents made more than two thousand self-portraits in workshops run by Finnish and international artists. This exhibition comprising an enormous number of works is being shown in the Finnish Museum of Photography’s Process Space.

Raakel Kuukka (b. 1955) belongs to the generation of powerful photographic artists in Finland who came onto the scene in the 1980s. One of the advance guard of photographing women, Kuukka turned her camera onto her own personal and family history. Ever since her debut exhibition in 1985, she has been photographing those close to her: her mother, her siblings, and her own daughter, Rebekka.

When the artists Hannele Rantala and Milja Laurila are making A Room of One’s Own in the museum’s Project Space, they will be creating installations there that deal with limited space, individual autonomy and livelihood, and artistic work.

Was the Estonian-born J.J. Reinberg (1823–1896) Finland’s first photographic artist? Reinberg’s touching portraits and landscapes open up a view of the Turku of 150 years ago. In these old, salted-paper prints we feel the presence of a different time and society, when the gentry and bourgeoisie,…

The name of the exhibition refers to Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in which a girl falls down a rabbit hole and ends up in strange places. Like the book, the exhibition moves from depictions of everyday life to fantasy worlds created or presented by the artists, and life is manifested as a ceaseless wavering on the borderline between these two domains.

What does a city look like to a homeless person? Where can you rest, eat or go for a wash? Once your basic needs have been met, what else do you have the energy to notice? And what does it feel like to move from the street into your own home? The seven individual series of pictures in the exhibition in the Process space give us some idea.

Ulla Jokisalo (b. 1955) fills the Finnish Museum of Photography with her photographic works, unique paper cut-outs, needle punctures and embroidery. Object assemblages installed between the picture collages by the artist herself create their own narratives.

When a daughter and mother want to get to know each other better, swapping clothes can help. Photographic artist Kristiina Männikkö contemplates her own relationship with her mother in the series Katse (The Gaze). Looking out of the portrait photographs are the artist in her mother’s clothes and the mother in her daughter’s surroundings.

The Finnish Museum of Photography houses a substantial collection, one that can sometimes surprize even the museum’s own staff with its variety. Gems from this cornucopia of images can now be seen in the Museum’s Process Space.

What does a ladybird see? What kind of photographs would a mole take? How would you like to see the world through an elk's eyes? Tuula Närhinen (b. 1967) built pinhole cameras with mechanisms that resemble the construction and function of various animals' eyes. She then set up the cameras in places…

Clothes make the man - but what about the child? Visual artist Heidi Lunabba's (b. 1977) series of pictures investigates how clothes and other visual emblems are used to accentuate and define a child's gender. Each child at a workshop has been photographed as both a girl and a boy, and the two pictures have been digitally merged into a single image to make "twins".

Johanna Heldebro’s (b. 1982) often uncomfortably personal work explores notions of obsession, photographic representation and personal boundaries.

In her exhibition Fransson contemplates fashion-store display windows, both as a visual phenomenon and as part of the cultural history of consumerism. The windows are like theatre sets or cinema screens, in which the objects shine in the spotlights. Like a theatre performance, in order to have…

Before or after seeing the exhibition in Turku, its atmosphere can also be experienced in the Finnish Museum of Photography's Process Space, which has been turned into a comfortable Alice in Wonderland living room.

Sammallahti's photographs take the viewer beyond everyday experience into a wistfully enchanting world. Regardless of where on the globe Sammallahti goes - Finland, Russia or France - there is a gentle humour in his gaze. In Sammallahti's universe things that are considered unimportant…

In the pictures in the exhibition the rules of everyday life are broken, with strange juxtapositions and familiar objects used in disruptive ways. A human body and a broom, a hanger or cutlery are given new roles in relation to one another. The very existence of the artist, who appears as herself…

The Zapatistas hide their faces with commando-style ski masks. These "pasamontañas", originally used for reasons of security, have become the Zapatistas's symbol and trademark. The exhibition turns our gaze to our own society and, for example, to the state of civil society.

"When I became friends with the models, I realized that documenting the physical changes was not enough to show the pressures involved in the process, pressures that society places on transgender people. Transgender people are born physically in an in-between state, and in seeking a complete life…

The photographic artist Sami Parkkinen’s (b. 1974) Paradise photograph series records his life in pictures over a period of a year. The series is about depression and recovery from it.

"The snake's open jaws reached from the ground to the top of that tree. The whole village walked inside. Then the snake closed its mouth." Yom, Sudan The Refugee City exhibition uses grotesque and poetic landscape-images and portraits to tell about the lives of the people in Kenya's Kakuma…

"I was sitting on a train on my way home, and listening to music. The words of a child sitting behind me penetrated through the music. She was saying how, nowadays, it is nice to go home from the children's home for the weekend, since mummy no longer throws her against the wall."

Between 2006 and 2009, Ann Pelanne made several visits to quiet little village, and to the premises of what used to be Kellokoski Ironworks, to take photographs. These trips were made in different years and different seasons. The result was Mariefors Blues, the artist's interpretation of the…

"There is almost no summer night in the north; only a lingering evening, darkening slightly as it lingers, but even this darkening has its ineffable clarity." Thus begins F.E. Sillanpää's novel Ihmiset suviyössä (1934, quotation from People in the Summer Night, transl. by Alan Blair, 1966). The…

The exhibition at the Finnish Museum of Photography offers the first extensive overview of the Harvesters'photographs, which were created in the face of the intense headwind blowing from the left-wing artworld. The Harvesters group's photographs also allow us to view writing about the history of Finnish photography in a new light.

Art-photography students from the Aalto University School of Art and Design collected Finnish people's memories of Paris. With these memories as their research material, they used their cameras to record their own interpretations. The result is a pictorial travelogue from various corners of this…

The show includes Majuri's earlier photographs along with totally new works made for the exhibition: Kultakolikot / Treasure (2009), Lumikettu / Arctic Fox (2009) and Vesiputous / Waterfall (2009). "My new pictures give me a childish euphoria: I'm writing in a language that I can't even read yet!" Majuri says.