It’s said, hindsight is 100 percent true, as we use our experience to see what our eyes can’t. Looking inside ourselves to understand what surrounds our being from one moment to the next, is the challenge we all face throughout our lives. To contemplate the past, future or the present, everybody utilizes a sensibility that’s unique for each individual in their process of maturing and discovering who they are. This exhibition presents six different perspectives in how these selected artists define their concept of identity.

Elina Brotherus, the most celebrated Finnish photographer of her generation, has spent her entire career using herself as the raw material, exposing her strengths and vulnerabilities in the pursuit to interpret the various stages of her own life. Whereas Miia-Mari Virtanen uses her body as a platform to study the fragility of being. Virtanen uses medical imaging and recording techniques to explore the electrical signals that trigger ones heartbeat as the starting point for her photographs. Kukka-Maria Rosenlund on the other hand, uses cycles of time as the main character of her work. This process is based on her interest in the visible and invisible worlds and their borders, that are rooted in her families’ history as a joint collective memory. Another perspective, which reads far more like a poem than a photograph, are Rita Anttila’s images as they capture the very thin balance between who she is, where she comes from and where she dreams to go. Anni Leppälä, who also works in a similar vein of thought, though dramatically differing in the way she reinvents her own history, pictorially unfolds her families female history through the use of several generations’ forgotten clothes, cutouts, toys and ancestral homes. Aino Kannisto has been creating staged photographs of fictive scenes with herself embedded as solitary protagonist for almost twenty years now. Her compositions convey emblematic situations, constructing complete visual worlds. It is her way of depicting the passage of time and where she is within it. And finally, one of the most inspirational artists who has in her own way influenced all the above throughout her 40 year career is Ulla Jokisalo. Jokisalo, who many consider to be the Louise Bourgeois of the Nordic region, has pursued her sense of storytelling through her approach in defining and defying the various stereotypes that women have been portrayed in from her earliest memories to the present.

All these artists project a very poetic touch in their realization of what anticipation to contemplation looks like from the inside looking out.