PHOTOGRAPHIC GALLERY HIPPOLYTE
Kalevankatu 18 B, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
+358 9 612 33 44, www.hippolyte.fi

Wilma Hurskainen
NO NAME
12.9.-5.10.2008
Open: Tue-Fri 12:00-17:00, Sat-Sun 12:00-16:00.

My exhibition No Name consisting of photographs and texts handles passing of time and memory. No Name is a series of intersecting and partly overlapping stories told by the photographs and the texts. Two time levels, childhood and adulthood are overlapped in the photographs.

A starting point of the series is confusion that have seized me while working with my childhood pictures. I have turned to a photograph in the hope of remembering my personal history and to keep it in order __- just to find out at some stage that my sincere trust in the photograph has made me remember things wrong or to forget them.

I look at the childhood picture to realize that I don't remember any of this, that is probably me, but I can't be sure about it. In my earlier series Growth I made as exact copy as possible of my old childhood picture and thus assured myself that I have been there because I remember it, probably twice, but at least once. Now I construct new images of my memories in the same way: based on either the memories, which were never photographed, or making up new stories and creating new memories showing themselves as the original ones. With this series I want to make clear what's wrong with me: both the photograph and the memory are wavering, complicated and confusing processes hiding themselves, in which nothing is what it seems to be and nothing remains the same, not for a moment. I have been there, or I haven't been there, or then it was someone else, somewhere else.

The texts hung by the photographs open the character of the images as a part of the process of remembering and remembering wrong. I try to study and make visible the methods the viewer/reader uses when receiving a story conveyed by the photograph on one hand and the writing on the other. Superficially the writing seems much more straightforward in its narration than the photograph; and yet it is just the photograph that has an indexical relationship with the thing happened. The viewer/reader is put in a different position in relation to the text and the photograph.

On the other hand the series expresses the endless struggle between a picture and a text when showed together. Which comes first? Is it about illustrated short stories or pictures with captions? I wish that looking at my installation of photographs and texts would remind the complicated process, that remembering and constant rewriting of the memories is. At the same time the texts comment on the photographs and the possibilities of being in the photographs or posing in them.

Wilma Hurskainen

Wilma Hurskainen (born 1979) is an artist and a press photographer living and working in Helsinki. Hurskainen has had solo exhibitions in Finland, Rumania and Moldova. She has also participated in many group exhibitions in Europe and in Japan. In her works Hurskainen has dealt with the themes including girlhood, sisterhood and passing of time. She has also written about photograph (e.g. an essey in a book Suhteita presenting the production of Victor Barsokevitsch) and published a book Kasvu/Growth (publisher Musta Taide ) in 2008.

Wilma Hurskainen, Karitsa, 2006 

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