PHOTOGRAPHIC GALLERY HIPPOLYTE
Kalevankatu 18 B, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
+358 9 612 33, www.hippolyte.fi
Open: Tue-Fri 12-17, Sat-Sun 12-162–30 December 2011
KIMMO SARJE
Apartment on the Prospekt
Two panel discussions will be arranged during the exhibition period. (Discussion in Finnish.)
Thursday, 8 December, at 5pm: Jan Kaila, Markku Kivinen, Rosa Liksom and Kimmo Sarje
Thursday, 15 December, at 5pm: Kimmo Sarje, Oula Silvennoinen, Henriikka Tavi and Juha-Heikki Tihinen
In summer 2003, I spent a month in Petrozavodsk on a Nordic scholarship/grant. I lived in the centre of the town on the Lenin Prospekt in an apartment building dating back to before the war. I was told that my flat had in the 1940s belonged to a young communist politician called Yuri Andropov. No objects remained in the apartment from Andropov’s time. The privately owned two-room flat was furnished in a rather anonymous Soviet style.
Awareness of its association with a prominent Soviet leader could not but affect the atmosphere in the flat. It lent the place a historical charge. The flat and its simple furnishings seemed to be pervaded by the community of fate between Finland and Soviet Karelia, the struggle between nationalism and communism. Back in Finland I learned that during the Finnish occupation from 1941–1944 the house had been used as the dormitory for the female staff of a Finnish military hospital.
During the war, Andropov, a protégé of Otto Wille Kuusinen, participated in the ideological struggle for Karelia in both a Marxist-Leninist and a romantic Kalevalan spirit. In Petrozavodsk, army officers ideologically schooled by the Finnish nationalist Academic Karelia Society implemented a racist mockery of their tribal ideology by shutting up local Russian inhabitants into concentration and forced labour camps. Meanwhile, Andropov and Kuusinen, cynically aware of the arbitrary mass executions, made an appeal to the nationalist sentiments and cultural heritage of the Karelian populace. During the war, the struggle for the cultural heritage of the Kalevala grew into a myth that gave an edge to armies and also featured in the writings of Finnish intelligence officers and Soviet leaders alike.
The montage exhibition Apartment on the Prospekt leads the viewer down into the metaphysics of Petrozavodsk, the innermost cores of communism and Finnish nationalism. The dialogue arises from the juxtaposition of photographs taken by me, documentary photos from the occupation, and quotations from contemporary writings.
Petrozavodsk is a vantage point for Finnish self-understanding.
Kimmo Sarje
Kimmo Sarje (b. 1951) is a visual artist and philosopher (PhD). As an artist, he has since 1984 exhibited montage works which examine the foundations of modernism and socialism. Russia and the Soviet Union are among the key themes of Sarje’s art.
He has works in the collections of many leading Finnish art museums. Sarje is also a researcher and critic. He has written and edited over a dozen books on art, architecture and philosophy. The latest is Sigurd Frosterus: Arkkitehtuuri (Kustannusosakeyhtiö Taide 2010), edited and furnished with a thorough introduction by Sarje. Currently Kimmo Sarje works as research coordinator in the doctoral programme at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. He is also Docent in Aesthetics at the University of Helsinki.
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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
Kimmo Sarje: A detail fron the series Apartment on the Prospekt, 2003-2011
