The pieces in Pasi Rauhala’s interactive installation react to its viewer’s movements and actions inside the exhibition space. A starting point to Pasi Rauhala’s work has been current discussions around the changing experiences of truth and reality with the abundance of available information ever expanding. Not unlike algorithms that shape the contents of our social media accounts based on the users’ actions, the presence and the choices of the viewer affect the exhibition’s content—its allegories of truth. The works are transformed and distort as the viewer approaches them.
Fragmented Reality asks if reality can be seen as anything but fragmented personal experiences, and what might follow if its value is undermined? Despite our awareness of the incalculable volume of available information, the idea and promise of reality are shadowed and blurred by constant and corporatised filtration. In the world of fake news, clickbait and content marketing, an opinion and a fact seem readily interchangeable.
Since photography revolutionised the representations of reality over a century ago, have virtual and augmented realities brought as its continuation new possibilities to experience view-scapes above the reality of our personal realm. Artificial intelligence is also capable of challenging what we consider real or possible. Visually, Pasi Rauhala’s piece partly reinforces a graphic illustration of something our human senses cannot perceive. The large-scale projection on the gallery wall, where lines react to the movements and actions of the viewer, is possibly measuring the experiences of some imaginary being—some inconceivable reality inaccessible to human senses. All the while, exhibition pieces continually react to one another, leaving the human on the periphery of the conversation.
Pasi Rauhala is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Lohja, in southern Finland. In his work, he employs both up to date techniques of media art as well as recycled materials and nostalgic paraphernalia. The humorous approach to sober topics is often characteristic to his works as well as a play with scales of things. Pasi Rauhala has participated in group exhibitions in Finland and abroad since 2004, and held his first solo show in 2008. www.pasirauhala.fi
The exhibition has been kindly supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland’s National Council for Audiovisual Art and Arts Council of Uusimaa.
Pasi Rauhala
Fragmented Reality
3–26 August 2018
Photographic Gallery Hippolyte
Open: Tue–Fri 12–17, Sat–Sun 12–16