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

4.-27.3.2011
SINI PELKKI
Echo for Two

An echo is the reception of a delayed copy of a signal, such as a sound or a radio signal. Sini Pelkki’s images seem to speak about the very likeness of photography, about how space and reality are perceived pictorially instead of directly by way of observation or bodily experience. Ultimately, a photograph is always a representation, a mere echo of something that exists or has existed.

Pelkki’s new images are full of doubles; symmetrically folded papers that resemble ‘geometric Rorschach’ blots, imitation marble, photocopies, mirror images or seemingly mirrored images and recurring gestures. As viewers we become aware of the boundaries of the image, of a kind of stage, and the artificiality of this restricted space. It is a kind of presentation for the camera, one where figures and discrete objects seem to have an equal value. Nor is it certain who plays the leading role, or if the protagonist has been left outside the frame altogether. The body is addressed almost as plastic matter, such as in the repeatedly occurring cut-off arms. Those sculptural relics, yet inherently human tools of communication.

Just as Pelkki’s earlier video works, the new video Channel (2011) is composed entirely of still photographs. The new piece investigates the surface of the image with an almost structuralist fury, very much like Passage (2009). The raw material of the piece is a found slide, a studio photograph of a nude woman from the 1940s. The overexposed, time-bleached picture, badly chafed by the frame, becomes the centre of Pelkki’s relentless attention. Whereas Passage searched for the surface of the image in an empty picture, in merely the light of the projection itself, focusing on the dust and dirt inside the slide projector. Channel depicts and searches for its boundaries in a slide turned monochromatic with age, an image where the boundaries of its motif (the body) and the boundaries of the slide itself are no longer easy to determine.

Pelkki’s work is anchored in an intermediate zone between several traditions of pictorial and photographic art, and in their points of juncture. Artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Bruce Nauman, Francesca Woodman, Bas Jan Ader and Tacita Dean have each in their own time addressed the same themes that are central to Pelkki’s practice, such as the tensions between the body and space and the conflict between inner and outer experience. In fact, Pelkki once observed that it is interesting how the same motifs and themes acquire new meanings in different times and in different contexts.

The titles of Pelkki’s pieces impart a powerful emotional charge to the conceptual themes: Sigh in a Dark Space; Slow, Motion; Echo for Two. Abstract emotional experiences are woven inseparably into the conceptual, almost ontological approach in which Pelkki addresses the very nature of image making. Pelkki’s visual vocabulary is layered, subtle and sensitive, and her works do not offer any simple solutions.

Jani Ruscica

 

Sini Pelkki (b. 1978) works with photography and the moving image, video and film. She earned a Bachelor’s degree from the Chelsea College of Art & Design in London in 2002, and a Master’s degree from the Department of Time and Space Arts at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2008. Pelkki’s previous solo exhibition, Entrance to Exit, was shown in the Kluuvi Gallery of the Helsinki Art Museum in July 2009. From December 2009 to January 2010, Pelkki worked in Stockholm on a residency grant from Photographic Gallery Hippolyte and Centrum för fotografi (CFF). The exhibition created during the residency was presented in the gallery of the Finnish Institute in Stockholm in February 2010. In recent years, Pelkki’s works have been shown in numerous venues, including the Finnish Museum of Photography, Kunsthalle Helsinki in Finland, SantralIstanbul in Turkey and Riga Art Space in Latvia.

Sini Pelkki, Echo for Two, 2010

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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