Enter through the frame. Fit within the square. A blue metallic surface, with leaning shapes and angles. Watch it like an ocean and wait for it to move. Stay where you are. Hide behind your hair.

Careful: edges can be sharp and objects shifting, looking something other than they are. Colours may have faded, run or lost their power. Altered, but the same for one that knows them. Stay in place to make it better. Don’t disrupt the composition, even if it asks you questions you can’t answer.

-Emma Hammarén

The exhibition Allow in the Hippolyte gallery consists of independent photographic works that take shape as they settle into the space—interacting with one another and with the movement and shifting rhythms that emerge through associations, materials, and the viewer’s presence. Elements and compositions repeat and recur: hands, cameras, bodies, movement. The act of looking is guided, framed, and obstructed, but seeing is not.

Allow builds upon Sini Pelkki’s exhibition Evolving Window, presented at the Turku Art Museum in autumn 2024. Pelkki’s works explore the complexity of seeing and the subjectivity of the gaze through photography and moving image. Her practice is inherently spatial, extending both within and beyond the image. Many of the photographic works on display were developed alongside Present (2024), a film shot on 16mm, and share both a conceptual and internal space with it.

Sini Pelkki (b. 1978) is a visual artist based in Helsinki, working with photography, moving image, space, and its rhythm. In recent years, her practice has shifted towards collaborative works rooted in interaction and interpretation, taking form not only through photography and moving image but also performance. Pelkki’s past exhibitions include Evolving Window at the Turku Art Museum (2024), Is All at Forum Box/Mediabox (2023), meaningful meanings at Hippolyte (2021), Dance! Movement in Visual Art 1880–2020 at HAM Helsinki Art Museum (2022), Present at Cité internationale des arts, Paris (2022), Departing Shadow at Monitoimitila O. (2020), and Sheet No4 at HAM Gallery (2018). She has work in numerous collections including those of the Saastamoinen Foundation, Kiasma, and HAM Helsinki Art Museum. Currently, her work Embarkation is on view in Kiasma’s collection exhibition Paper, Stone, Scissors, and her works are also featured in EMMA, in the Saastamoinen Foundation’s collection exhibition Dialogues.

Pelkki studied fine art at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London (BA Fine Art, 2002) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki (MFA, 2008). She received the William Thuring Designated Prize from the Finnish Art Society in 2014 and was shortlisted for the Below Zero Award in 2017.

The artist’s work and exhibition have been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike) and the Uusimaa Regional Fund of the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

Sini Pelkki
ALLOW
4 April–4 May 2025
Photographic Gallery Hippolyte

image: Sini Pelkki, Handle with Care (A Door to a Handle), 2022/2024