Milja Laurila

The Helsinki School – Out of the Depths of Photography

Opening: Friday, 15 November 6 - 8 pm

Exhibition: 16 November 2024 - 08 February 2025

Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 35, 10969 Berlin

The exhibition The Helsinki School—Out of the Depths of Photography continues in its longstanding tradition of pushing the boundaries of how we perceive and interpret the photographic image. This presentation features a range of explorations into how different materials—such as fabrics, layered collages, and folded film negatives transformed into sculptures—can be utilized to form a new visual language within the photographic process today. It represents a collective effort to redefine the material qualities of the photograph, attempting to recover its magic as a physical object. This is the first fully dimensional overview from any previous Helsinki School presentations to conceptually challenge these existing parameters.

Milja Laurila | Untitled Women

Opening: Friday, 29 April 2022, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: 28 April – 25 June 2022

Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

During Gallery Weekend Berlin 2022.

Persons Projects is proud to present Milja Laurila’s Untitled Women series, which utilizes a present day feminist lens to understand how women have historically been viewed by men.

The 1930s book titled Woman. An Historical Gynæcological and Anthropological Compendium acts as a point of departure for Laurila’s work. Originally published in German in 1885 and written by three men, the book is illustrated with hundreds of photographs of naked women and children from all over the world, primarily colonized countries. This cross between anthropology, racism, and sexism, come together to create an uncomfortable viewing experience that claims to be ‘scientific’. The photographed women have no voice and they are presented as exotic specimens found in nature. The ethnographic pictorial style allowed the pretence of looking at women objectively and innocently. The exoticizing gaze, with its sexual desire, was hidden behind the veneer of legitimate scientific inquiry.

Milja Laurila – In Their Own Voice

Opening: Friday, March 11, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: March 12 - April 23, 2016

Gallery Taik Persons proudly presents Milja Laurila’s most recent works in the solo exhibition In Their Own Voice raising the questions of the apparent transparency of our pictorial realm and the act of being looked at.

Who is looking and whom is the gaze being focused on? How do we look at a body, a child, a woman, a man, the world? Are we looking without seeing? We are observing, but the sight might penetrate its target, see distorted, drift away. Laurila questions if photographs have the ability to forget what they once were proof of. She asks, if images detached from their original context, still remain related to the original semantic field or transform into something else. Can an image of a young girl’s spine suffering from scoliosis transform without captions into a sculptural beauty?