About Pasi Autio
A Text published in The Helsinki School, Vol. 3. - Young Photography by TaiK, Hatje Cantz 2009, p. 19.
"My works are often both humorous and deadly serious at the same time."
The overall theme of Pasi Autio's video works is human communication. The proximity of earnestness and humor in his work is shown in the piece Yes Hmm No Hmm. The title describes the contents: in twenty videos arranged in horizontal and vertical rows. Autio himself appears and in a monotonous voice expresses affirmation, hesitation, and negation. The work reflects the tragedy and comedy of a man wrestling to formulate a clear-cut opinion, instead finding himself lost in the echo of his own voice. At the same time, it can be seen as a group of people trying to arrive at a common opinion about something.
Autio switches from a monologue to a dialogue in his work From a Little Gesture. In the eleven-minute long shot, a woman and a man are seated side by side and behave as if they are sitting in front of a mirror. Deploying mimic and gesture, they examine their own appearance. The irritating fact is that each imitates the behavior of the other, whereby the order in which they do so changes several times: "I wanted to show how people affect each other and not that one of them alone is the leader. I thought of middle-aged couples reminding each other by choosing the other one's gestures and also how they often understand from a little gesture what the other one is about to do or say, good and bad. How irritating that can be when you know what the other one is about to say, and you get bored with the other one's thoughts. At the same time, it must make you feel safe and secure."
In the work J & S, the focus is on communication between genders. In two separate films, a young man and a young woman silently face each other, standing on a revolving playground carousel. The two films are mounted side by side in such a way that the landscapes behind them fly towards one another at high speed and meet up at the seam-line between the two images. Thus the landscapes in the background bring to completion the fusion that the figures themselves fail to achieve. At the same time, the carousel is also an image of the world that only seems to change at breakneck speed, but actually turns in an eternal circle.
