The exhibition features a photography-based projection divided into four parts according to the seasons. It examines people’s relationships with themselves, other people, and the urban environment. The pieces evoke an overarching theme concerning stages of transition—emphasising periods of adjustment and moments in which something old becomes something new and unfamiliar. The results are unconventional when newly created images are formed by the combination of elements from two different images which encompass entirely different worlds.

Saku Soukka is interested in the viewer’s experience during times of continuous processes of change such as the shift between indoor and outdoor spaces or private and public areas. Further, the impact of the Internet is additionally a decisive factor in this, as tangible and physical reality has a nearly unbroken connection to the online world. These two worlds are interlocked in our everyday lives where periods of transition, in other words, in-out-public-private, constitute our experiences. Soukka chooses to slow down and, at the same time, deepen the gaze. He aims to show that inside, and behind, ordinary objects and phenomena of everyday life lies various levels of seeing—there are always deeper layers related to the entire being of an individual. The photographs have been taken both indoors and on the streets and outskirts of Helsinki. Things fade away and are replaced by new images that shape the appearance of our world. This process is never-ending. Art that visualises these systems communicates with our inner world and its happenings.

Saku Soukka describes his work:

“The narrative and autobiographical entity of photos, texts, and sounds are wandering and drifting in different directions as they will. The mind is an ever-changing window where the breeze blows both in and out. There is a glass-like surface between the inside and outside world, searching for its true form.”

Projection enables the slow and, in the artist’s own words, “lingering” encounter in which two images become another or, in effect, a third image. In the centre of the idea is the goal of finding an expression and a style for the mindscape –thorough understanding. The overlapping disposition and the slow merging of images incorporate a poetic dimension. The mind is carried to the world of surrealism where surprising parallels are drawn between disparate elements and where strange encounters create new meanings. Their routine nature, as it were, opens our eyes to what surrounds us and what, when revisited, may be similarly strange and foreign. They sharpen our gaze and our power of observation but also open new meanings that play a role in making the world an interesting place. The photograph with the text “This is not about winning or losing” features a bunch of wilted tulips in a glass, as if to remind us that in life you cannot “win” or “lose” as we are all biological beings bound to time and its laws.

– Maaretta Jaukkuri

Saku Soukka (1982) is an artist residing in Helsinki. His primary medium is the photograph which he combines in various ways with text, audio, video and installations. Numerous sub-themes come together to form the central theme of the pieces: identity. They mirror the concepts of self, otherness and hybridity. Present are encounters and dialogues between notions of the internal and external, stagnation and movement, and organic and industrial.. Soukka graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2016. He has exhibited in Finland and abroad and published a book of photographs and poems entitled Paperipeili (Noxboox 2016). Further purchases are available from Hippolyte’s bookstore. www.sakusoukka.com

Arts Promotion Centre Finland has kindly supported the exhibition.

Four-part photo-projection Window In-Between, 2017 duration: 63min. photography: Saku Soukka texts: Saku Soukka field recordings: Jani A. Purhonen & Saku Kämäräinen photo changing technique: Saku Soukka soundscape based on field recordings: Saku Soukka sample of the winter section: https://vimeo.com/203963329

Saku Soukka
Window In-between
23.11.–16.12.2018
Hippolyte Studio
Open: Tue–Fri 12–17, Sat–Sun 12–16

image: Saku Soukka, Window In-between (Winter), 2017,
still photo from photograph projection