Marja Söderlund’s exhibition focuses on knowing and experiencing place. Through landscapes and places, we can connect and belong, even when places change.
The exhibition follows a mise en abyme structure, where the illusion of depth is created through a smaller scale pattern repeating inside a larger one. Söderlund’s method of montage links one piece to another, with the recurrence of parallel characters and still-life configurations. Together the pieces build spaces that open and close within each other.
At the core of the material, both photographed and found by the artist, are combinations of landscapes, interiors and architectural structures. The images take us to old places, parks and yards, landscapes to which the artist attaches memories from elsewhere. Different parts of the montages bring to the place a parallel situation or event, but also the unmodified images connect to the whole through repetition. The changes in scale and the recurrence of structures and forms bring forth connections between places and moments.
Places form relationships to events through experience or learning. The past is always reinterpreted in the present. On the other hand to perceive the present, the past, history, and its interpretations are always necessary. There are no straightforward stories to be verbalised in Marja Söderlund’s images, but parallel, fluid, poetic occurrences. The Script of a Place offers the viewer starting points to interpret the experience of time and place.
Marja Söderlund is a visual artist based in Helsinki. She graduated with a BA in photography from the University of Art and Design Helsinki (currently Aalto University) in 1993. Her works have been exhibited in Finland in both private and group exhibitions since the 1990’s. Marja Söderlund’s previous solo exhibition in Helsinki was at Gallery Heino. Her works are included in several public collections in Finland, e.g the State Art Collection and the collection of the Saastamoinen Foundation.
Thank you: Arts Promotion Centre Finland
29 September – 22 October 2017
MARJA SÖDERLUND
The Script of a Place
Hippolyte Studio
Yrjönkatu 8–10 courtyard, 00120 Helsinki
+358 9 612 33 44, www.hippolyte.fi
Opening hours: Tue–Fri 12–5 pm, Sat–Sun 12–4 pm
image: Marja Söderlund, Sisäkuva, 2012/2017