PHOTOGRAPHIC GALLERY HIPPOLYTE
Kalevankatu 18 B, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
+358 9 612 33 44, www.hippolyte.fi
Open: Tue–Fri 12–17, Sat–Sun 12–167–30 January 2011
Jaakko Ruuska
ON STRANGE GROUNDSTuesday 11 January 2011 at 5 pm Panel discussion: “Body Technique” – inside and out
The panellists are Esa Kirkkopelto, Professor of Artistic Research at the Finnish Theatre Academy, Janne Juhana Rantala, anthropologist, and Jaakko Ruuska. Discussion in Finnish.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -What do my eyes fix on, when I do not understand the cultural meanings of the things I see? Would it be possible to see once again the way children see things? Would I then see the world as nothing but colours and shapes? Would it be possible to see differently?
On Strange Grounds consists of documentary photographs and a film installation. It explores the gaze as mediated by the cinematic image and photography. Images created mechanically with a film or a still camera only capture traces of light in space and time – the object of the gaze is determined by the viewer. From minute fragments of information, my mind continuously attempts to construct desperate interpretations, although I may also recognise the fictive quality of my thoughts.
The exhibition consists of photographic series shot between 2 April and 27 October 2009 in Japan, a culture I did not know at the time. Using a small, lightweight and relatively inexpensive digital camera I tried to capture fleeting visions in which something would fascinate the viewer without revealing what it actually was. I was struck by the number of people sleeping all over the place. All kinds of people, sleeping in any place and at any time, as if the whole world was their home where they could rest. I fell in love with reflections, collages created by accident, in which the mind tries in vain to find out where the elements come from, while the picture itself remains obstinately silent.
I compiled the exhibition together with my Japanese friends, Seiji and Hatsumi Mizuno, selecting pictures that seemed strange to them too. Their comments and what I saw in the pictures myself developed into a dialogue with the viewer on the relationship between seeing and interpreting pictures. We conducted the dialogue in English, which was a shared foreign language for us (hence the English title of the exhibition as well).
In the cinematic installation Landscape for the Body I try to study whether another person’s body might convey sensations of space that would otherwise be invisible to the cinematic image. Using a stationary 8mm film camera in the same way as one would use a still camera, I filmed dancers as well as ordinary people who were either doing something ‘authentically’ in a visible relation to the surrounding space, or through a choreography in which they reacted to something in the space. In the diptych projection, the different relationships to space are either parallel or emphasise their mutual difference. The sound design of the installation is by Jaakko Autio, the musician is Ilkka Heinonen. The sound is designed to fit the silent film and the viewer’s space in the gallery.
Acknowledgements: The Aalto University School of Art and Design / Department of Motion Picture, Television and Production Design,
Alfred Kordelin Foundation, AVEK (The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture)Jaakko Antero Ruuska (b. Savonlinna, Finland, on 25 February 1981):
Jaakko Ruuska is currently preparing his MA thesis in documentary filmmaking in the School of Art and Design at the Aalto University. The subject of his thesis is cinematic corporeality from the phenomenological perspective of the body. In his films, Jaakko Ruuska has investigated the zone between documentary and fictive narrative (Valon lapset 2008, Pakeneva maa 2005). Documentary film studies (University of Art and Design Helsinki, BA in documentary filmmaking, 2008) led Ruuska to investigate the cinema image not only from the perspective of the mediating role of the director, but also that of the cinematographer, and finally from the viewpoint of the experience of becoming an image. When he was an exchange student in Kyoto (2009), Ruuska studied butoh under Ima Tenko (who also appears in Landscape for the Body). After returning to Finland, he joined the Esa Kirkkopelto’s ensemble Other Spaces.
Jaakko Ruuska, 2009- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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
