Santeri Tuori – Time present and time past

Santeri Tuori – Time present and time past

Opening: Friday, May 2, 2014, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: May 3 – June 21, 2014

Gallery Taik Persons is thrilled to present Santeri Tuori’s first solo exhibition in Berlin. The show exhibits photographs from the series Sky Prints (2011– 12/2014), as well as a video from the Forest series (2009).

Santeri Tuori is one of Finland’s leading contemporary visual artists. As an exponent of the Helsinki School, he has become well known for his innovations in merging the media of photography and video art. The combination of still and moving images in Tuori’s works weaves together multiply layered com- positions that present more than the mere sum of their productive parts. While the subjects of his series have various origins in classical genres of human portraiture (e.g. Bogeyman [2001/2004], 35 Minute Smile [2002], Karlotta [2003/2004]), traditions of landscape painting (as with the works now on display), or in more abstracted, minimalist depictions of nature and natural environment (e.g. Sea [2004], Waterfall [2006]), all have in common that space is never organized according to the straightforward linear logic of temporal order and movement habitual to our practices of seeing – not only in viewing nature, but also art.

In Tuori’s Sky Prints, for example, our gaze is directed rntowards the autonomous theme of the sky, which is unframed from its rnusual context of the ‘total landscape’.Tuori’s video works consist of rnsingle photographs and moving image segments of the same landscape rnmotif. Both sets of images are superimposed onto one another. The final rnvideo sequence is projected onto a photographic print; sometimes this isrn done via rear-screen projection, so that the technical devices remain rninvisible to the viewer, effectuating the photographic still to ‘awaken’rn to life through the motion of the videotape. In another method, the rnstill photograph is vice versa incorporated into the moving image with rnan editing program; both are combined in a single video file. Aspects ofrn technical and creative production go hand in hand with each other, rnTuori explains: "My works evolve very much with the working process. I rnmight have a starting point for a work, but many times, no idea how the rnfinal work will look like [...].”. In any case, the melding of color rnvideo with black-and-white photography alters significantly the way the rnimage will look. Though the final works can still be discerned in their rnelements as videos and photographs, they bring forth something new, a rnthird image; one that in its surreal quality is perhaps most suitably rncompared with painting.

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In Tuori’s Forest video works, which are edited in a rncontinuous loop, the techniques of projection, blending, and rnfragmentation question the conventional representational truths often rnestablished through the fabric of photographs and films. Instead, there rnemerges from them a transient, subtly flickering image of the landscape,rn which slowly unfolds its billowing seasons of change along a very own, rncomplex structure of time. Under the subdued light of a visually rnstratified picture space, an asynchronous, somehow disconcerting story rnis quietly narrated. As viewers we receive the chance to inhabit and, inrn turn, be enlivened by the myriad expansions and compressions of rnpresence and place, and to escape, at least for a prolonged moment of a rnwork’s duration, the safe and reliable home of common clock time as we rnknow it. Gently consoling is the continual soundscape of gusting wind rnand rushing water that surrounds and accompanies our lonesome journey; rnand yet, uncanny, too – conjuring the remote pasts and distant fu- turesrn that will never become known to us.

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-Shao-lan Hertel

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Santeri Tuori, born 1970 in Espoo, rnFinland, lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. He received a Master of rnLaw degree from the University of Helsinki in 1999, after which he rnobtained Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees in Photography in 2000 and rn2003, respectively, at the University of Arts, Design and Architecture rnHelsinki. Solo and group exhibitions since 1997 have continuously shown rnhis works in numerous countries in Europe, North and South America, rnRussia, East Asia, and Africa. His works are included a.o. in the rncollections of the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, the Finnish Museum of rnPhotography, the FRAC Haute-Normandie, the Malmoe Art Museum, and the rnMuseum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, as well as numerous private rncollections worldwide.