This year’s last exhibition at Hippolyte deals with one of the most essential questions in photography, the relationship between image and reality. Super-illusion is based on stories and documents on Ted Serios who became famous in the 1960’s in the US. Serios was thought to have been able to produce photographs purely with the power of his mind. The extraordinary abilities of this wild and charismatic vagabond were extensively studied, but also put into question and accused of being a hoax.
Dr Jule Eisenbud, interested in Freudian psychoanalysis and parapsychology, took Ted under his wing and devoted his life to studying Serios’s abilities. The image files for the exhibition are courtesy of the Jule Eisenbud collection on Ted Serios and thoughtographic photography, located at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The exhibition also features an excerpt from Rebecca Baron’s short film Detour de Force, also based on documentary materials on Ted Serios.
The exhibition, while making use of documentaristic material, takes the viewer onto the stage of the image itself. It makes no comment on whether Ted Serios’s abilities were real or not, but shows the framework of his story as an allegory for how the reality perceived by our eyes is eventually just a construction of our mind. In a photograph, a moment captured into stillness, reality reveals itself in a particular way. In Ted’s images the relationship between reality and an image can be seen in a new light.
Marjaana Kella (b.1961) is a visual artist, a researcher and a teacher. Her artistic work intertwines with the ontological character of photography and its ability to make visible the pictorial nature of the world. Marjaana Kella is one of the best-known Finnish photographic artists and her works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally. Marjaana Kella was awarded the State Prize for Photographic Art in 2003. Her doctoral dissertation was approved at the Aalto University media department in 2014. She is currently the Vice Dean and a Professor of Photography at the Fine Arts Academy in Helsinki.
25 November – 18 December 2016
Marjaana Kella
SUPER-ILLUSION
The Wondrous World of Ted Serios
Together with Ted Serios, Jule Eisenbud, Rebecca Baron
Photographic Gallery Hippolyte & 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, Closed 6 Dec 2016
Thank you:
Finnish Cultural Foundation, Alfred Kordelin Foundation
Chief Curator and Affiliate Associate Professor of Art, Thomas Beck & Jule Eisenbud collection, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Rebecca Baron
Image: Ted Serios
