Of all the compositions of time, I ended up in my own inner cave, watching reflections—shells of reality that I cannot control, raining down from everywhere. Today, I think of various images, internal and external, and those just beginning to form. How they take up space, expanding amidst breaths and fragmented attention. The humming spindles of perception wear the body down like water wears down a stone.

In Eeva Hannula’s exhibition In the Fugue of Gestures, Forms Arrange Themselves as They Wish, visitors traverse a collection of photo collages, collage series, and text works. The exhibition explores the magical indefinability of the image and the various forms of visuality.

The photo collages on display in the exhibition are composed of physical collages constructed for the camera, digital images, and combinations of both. They are built from archival materials, self-taken photographs, and the artist’s drawings. Hannula sees the works as hybrids, aiming to deconstruct and rethink traditional image types, meanings, and representations. The focus is often on hands and other body parts and their associative relationship with various objects and traces.

In her collage series, the artist abandons the significance of a single image and surrenders to the unruly mass of ever-evolving and changing images. The series consists of images that have been once printed, then physically dismantled, rearranged, and photographed or cropped into new assemblages. For Hannula, they are improvised visual streams of consciousness and cubist photo-writing, where physical collage pieces, shapes, and traces are “written” before the camera lens. Through these layered images and variations, Hannula explores the existence and boundaries of photographic material in her series.

The exhibition includes a poetry booklet titled Instructions for the Impossible. These poems provide instructions for performing various concrete or impossibly abstract actions with images. Some poems also describe imaginative, surreal events. The text collection is inspired by Yoko Ono’s work Grapefruit (1964). Central to the poems is the concept of imagery, exploring its multidimensionality and inherent freedom. Additionally, there are text works that blend collage and writing. If the exhibition were to describe itself in words, they would include: fluttering, elusive, unfinished, imperfect, wandering, uncertain, emerging, tentative, fumbling, clumsy, and disobedient.

Recycling and modifying photographic material through multiple printing stages is essential to Hannula’s art. She feels the need to slow down and dissolve the formation of the material in an effort to confront fragmented attention caused by the vast quantity, speed, and flow of contemporary images. Hannula’s creative process involves thinking through mass and repetition, and making images is like a journey with her eyes and hands. Writing poems flows into photo collages and vice versa. She regards the construction of her works as poetic and metaphorical thinking, involving the rewriting of photographic material through photography, drawing, writing, and collage-making. She is intrigued by the meaning-making process—how meanings change, break, or condense between images, texts, and materials. She sees her works as a continuous act of writing, never complete. Underlying her work is the idea of the image as an ever-forming substance, lacking a single static essence.

Eeva Hannula (b. 1983) is a writing photographic artist based in Helsinki. Her works combine photo collages with visual and written poetry, exploring the boundaries of photography, the connections between text and image, and the transformations of digital and physical traces. In her work, Hannula questions rational logic and examines the interplay between the unconscious elements of the camera, texts, and the artist herself. Her creations emphasise intuition, poetic thinking, and bodily knowledge.

Hannula graduated as a visual artist from Turku Arts Academy in 2012 and earned her master’s degree in photography from Aalto University in 2017. She has also studied aesthetics and literature at the University of Helsinki (BA) and creative writing at the Critical Academy in Jyväskylä. Hannula’s artworks have been featured since 2012 in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Finland and abroad. Most recently her works were showcased at the Metronom Gallery in Modena, Italy (2024), Gallery Forum Box in Helsinki, Finland (2023), and the Athens Photo Festival at the Benaki Museum in Greece (2022). In 2019, she published the book Amorphous Writings, a book that blends visual and written poetry with images. In 2021, the book was nominated for the international MACK First Book Award.

The Finnish Cultural Foundation and the Kone Foundation have supported Hannula’s work. This exhibition is supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike) and the Uusimaa Regional Fund of the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

Special thanks to my friends, Ville Kumpulainen, Anne Nåhls, poetry booklet graphic designer Tino Nyman, and Siim Vahur.

Eeva Hannula
In the Fugue of Gestures, Forms Arrange Themselves as They Wish
7 June – 30 June 2024
Photographic Gallery Hippolyte

image: Eeva Hannula, Kirjoituksen venähdys sammutti minusta pimeän, 2024