In Juuso Noronkoski’s exhibition, This Place Is Nowhere, photographs, texts, and sculptural elements search for the location of the image. Stressing the physicality of photography, the pieces do not just talk of their subjects but also of looking. Central are the perceptions situated somewhere between the actual and the imagined. What are the ways in which the processes of observation engender empathy? How can we see what others see and how can one appreciate an experience that takes place outside of your own body?
The exhibition presents photography, sculptures, and texts created by Juuso Noronkoski over the past two years. The text fragments present the viewer with the thinking process behind the photographs and sculptures, inviting you to ponder an image’s relationship to place, time, memory and written language. The works pose a question on subject and place: the perceptive space in which an image is ever-evolving and displaced. Where lies an image born between the concrete and the imaginary, where the edges of the measured world meet unmeasurable abstractions?
The artist’s studio plays an important role in Noronkoski’s works. While they transport the viewer through layers of time and geography, the narrator always remains shut within their own space. Associations between visual objects and storytelling shift as the viewer changes focus, what is physically present operates as clues to unseen alternative locations. As the distance of the gaze alters an unravelling begins, inside turns out and up goes down. Noronkoski’s work manages to highlight our relationship with fact and fiction, especially the role images play when constructing our own self-image and identity. On a daily basis, we all negotiate the meanings of images, and other, inner as well as outer, sources of narratives in relation to how we actually perceive ourselves and the world surrounding us.
Juuso Noronkoski (b. 1983, Helsinki) is a visual artist based in Helsinki. He graduated in 2015 with an MA in photography from Aalto University. The works at Hippolyte are displayed for the first time in Finland, but variations on This Place Is Nowhere was previously displayed at Loko Gallery in Tokyo earlier this autumn and last year at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. In addition to his personal artistic work, he is also an active member of several artist collectives.
Thank you: Arts Promotion Centre Finland
24 November – 17 December 2017
Juuso Noronkoski, This Place Is Nowhere
Photographic Gallery Hippolyte
Yrjönkatu 8–10 sisäpiha, 00120 Helsinki
Avoinna: ti–pe 12–17, la–su 12–16
image: Juuso Noronkoski, Device No.5 (The Third Sun), 2017 (detail)