PHOTOGRAPHIC GALLERY HIPPOLYTE
Kalevankatu 18 B, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
+358 9 612 33 44, www.hippolyte.fi
Open: Tue–Fri 12–17, Sat–Sun 12–16

10.9.-3.10.2010
Juha-Pekka Inkinen
ORIGIN

Welcome to the opening on Thursday 9 September 5-7 p.m.

It could be said that our own memories as well as borrowed ones reach back some 100–150 years. Things older than that are immemorial, history that predates the experiences of living individuals, the history of history books.

Juha-Pekka Inkinen has photographed tourists who come face to face with the everyday life of the past in arrested museal time – in the Seurasaari outdoor museum, some of the buildings in which date back as far as the 17th century. The visitors are transient flashes, temporary and more unreal that an old house dating back centuries.

The structures in such a house are functional to the extent that every seam and joint is imbued with the purpose of keeping the inhabitants alive. Today, these rooms are unfamiliar to us, and we would be hard put to live in such a dwelling. We would even be unaware of the purpose of many utensils, although our roots are there, in the smell of smoke, just a few generations ago.

A museal building that is older than our grandparents is at best a kind of time machine of everyday life that allows people in the present to return to the mists of history. The four transitions in the exhibition make use of black-and-white photographs of traditional Finnish life by the photographer I.K. Inha in the late 19th century.

”The picture is gentle and scary at the same time (just as the idea of such a transition probably always is).”
- Writer Sari Peltoniemi commenting on the photograph where an old woman appears from behind an oven.

Does the photograph depict an old dwelling within a modern museum context, or a modern person in an old dwelling?

Juha-Pekka Inkinen graduated as photographer from the Institute of Design at Lahti University of Applied Sciences in 1986. He has subsequently had 14 solo exhibitions and has participated in some 30 groupshows in Finland and abroad. Inkinen’s latest exhibitions are: 2005 Fractures of Life, Kiasma; 2006 Presence – Perspectives on Finnish Photography, Wäinö Aaltonen Museum; 2006 What’s Up North, Oulu Museum of Art; 2006 Suojatut (‘Protected’), Helsinki Photographic Gallery Hippolyte, and 2009 the photographic book: Punk on kuollut. Eläköön hardcore (‘Punk is dead, long live hardcore’), LIKE

Many people are familiar with Inkinen’s exhibitions featuring photographs of abandoned houses: A Long and Beautiful Friendship and Morality and Architecture 1,2 and 3. Inkinen has also published a book associated with the latter exhibition, Moraali ja arkkitehtuuri (only in Finnish). Inkinen’s work has two principal themes, the space and the time of society, and all his works revolve around them in some way.

For more information and press images, please contact:
Petronella Grönroos, exhibition co-ordinator / Photgraphic Gallery Hippolyte +358 9-612 33 44, firstname.lastname@hippolyte.fi