Nanna Hänninen | Vanishing View

Nanna Hänninen | Vanishing View

Closing event: Friday, 15 March 2024, 6 – 8 pm
Exhibition: 03 February – 16 March 2024
Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 35, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects is proud to present Nanna Hänninen’s exhibition Vanishing View. In the selected works, Hänninen focuses on current environmental issues that affect global communities, while intrinsically warning all of a future that is fast approaching. Her minimalist work conceptually challenges our perceptions of climate change by exploring through photography the gradual disappearance of uniquely diverse ecosystems. Exploring these impacts, Hänninen combines different, seemingly detached objects and places. In merging these factors together, the artist has found her own way to visually address the urgency of climate protection.

The Helsinki School Perspective

Opening: Friday, 30 June 2023, 6 – 8 pm
Exhibition: 1 July – 9 September 2023
Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 34 and 35, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects warmly welcomes you to our summer exhibition: The Helsinki School Perspective. The show is presented in both gallery spaces Lindenstr. 34 and 35, featuring a selection of artists, all of whom had pivotal roles in the beginning of the Helsinki School. The exhibition is dedicated to the historical aspect, exploring how these artists use the photographic processes as a voice for abstraction and a tool for interpreting their emotional landscapes. The Helsinki School platform was created by Timothy Persons in the 1990s, who became inspired by his experience with the Open Studio Concept that was popular during his graduate studies in the mid-1970s in Southern California. It grew to become the most extended sustainable educational platform of its kind consisting of 6 generations of selected MA students originating from the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland. There are now more than 180 monogram books and 6 volumes of the Helsinki School book that have evolved from this program. This exhibition is curated to reintroduce a new perspective on the conceptual roots that built The Helsinki School.
The Helsinki School Perspective
Refractive Landscapes

Refractive Landscapes


Exhibition: 27 April – 28 June 2023

Opening: Friday, 28 April 2023, 6 – 9 pm
Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

On the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2023, Persons Projects is proud to present the group exhibition Refractive Landscapes. The show focuses on a selected group of artists from the Helsinki School who use abstraction as their mutual language in heightening our awareness of environmental changes in our natural surroundings. By using different photographic methods, the presented artworks capture the transformation of light through time and unveil the collective poses of change. Sharing an openness of form as well as a lack of sharpness of lines, the presented works bridge a conceptual dialogue between photography and painting that float on time, not in it.

A Line Has Time in It – Revision


Exhibition: 26 November 2022 – 25 February 2023
Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr 35, 10969 Berlin


David Hockney, once said, "drawing takes time, a line has time in it.” Inspired by this, Persons Projects is proud to present a group exhibition exploring the various approaches that shift the parameters of understanding what a line can be in the context of a drawing. These selected artists use a multitude of different materials as well as the passage of time to express their conceptual propositions in visualizing these linear representations.

A Line Has Time in It – Revision
Jari Silomäki | The Affectionate Kalpana – My Story of Class Mobility

Jari Silomäki | The Affectionate Kalpana – My Story of Class Mobility

Exhibition: 26 November 2022 – 25 February 2023
Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin


"The streets in my hometown had no names. Two streets in Bombay are named after me. There is an influential deity in India called Bhagavān or Bhagwan. I am called Mada Bhagwan. I have done what the gods could not. I have helped the poor and the despairing.
– Dr. Kalpana Saroj

Persons Projects is proud to present Jari Silomäki’s new series The Affectionate Kalpana – My Story of Class Mobility which depicts the many different shades and outcomes of social class mobility. The selection of works presented in the exhibition consists of portraits, group pictures, and landscape photographs that the artist combines with text, written by the subjects in their native language, telling their life stories from their own perspective. Between objective documentation and subjective artistic perspective, this group of works introduces the viewer to the complexity of a global phenomenon that is still quite unknown to the western society. To further inform about this sociocultural matter, the series will be included in Silomäki’s latest monograph Jari Silomäki: Atlas of Emotions.

Niina Vatanen | Gravity Experiments and Cyclic Phenomena

Exhibition: 14 September – 19 November 2022
Opening: Friday, 16 September 2022, 6 – 9 pm
Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 35, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects is proud to present Niina Vatanen’s solo exhibition titled Gravity Experiments and Cyclic Phenomena. This exhibition follows her 2015 solo show at C/O Berlin, and her latest book Time Atlas (Kehrer Verlag, 2019). One’s experience of time is incredibly complex. By studying the movements of the planets, and with the help of various omens and prophecies, religions and oracles, humans have investigated not only our place in the universe, but also searched for answers to existential questions. In this exhibition, Vatanen does the same – she has combined images from various archives to create a multifaceted visual essay concerning time.
Niina Vatanen | Gravity Experiments and Cyclic Phenomena
In the Sky Unlike a Bird

In the Sky Unlike a Bird


Exhibition: 14 September – 19 November 2022
Opening: Friday, 16 September 2022, 6 – 9 pm
Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects is proud to present a group exhibition In the Sky Unlike a Bird which is a collection of five artists’ interpretations of how an individual weighs and ponders upon the different volumes of nothingness. It’s an exhibition that creates a space where words float in the air and islands hang by a thread pinned to an infinity of blue on blue. Imagine an image of gravity dangling by its arms or a man in the moon who teases the tides by splashing the ocean one wave at a time. Howard Altmann says it best in his poem used in collaboration with Dominik Lejman’s painting, "could it be the sky has changed its colors? The natural order is where I turn now to turn myself around”. It’s not about what we see but more so how we perceive the place we are in.

Tiina Itkonen | Ice Has a Memory: Greenland's Vanishing Song Lines

Opening: Friday, 1 July 2022, 6 – 8 pm
Exhibition: 2 July – 3 September 2022
Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 35, 10969 Berlin

"Now the ice is gone. When I was a child, there was always ice for hunting.”
– Quote from Inuit Hunter

Persons Projects is proud to present Tiina Itkonen’s solo exhibition, Ice Has a Memory: Greenland’s Vanishing Song Lines, which centers around her "Piniartoq1 project on Greenland’s Inuit community, which is indigenous to the region. It captures the effects of climate change on the broader Inuit community, its hunters, traditions, and the entire village’s way of life. The dire situations shown in her photographs reveal the various complexities involved, if there is to be any hope of reversing the negative effects of global warming. Her images remind all of us, wherever we live, that real change relies not only on working closely with these local communities, but respecting their cultural values and way of life as a mirror of our own.
Tiina Itkonen | Ice Has a Memory: Greenland's Vanishing Song Lines
By the Morning, the Butterfly Was Gone

By the Morning, the Butterfly Was Gone

Ilkka Halso | Sanna Kannisto | Sandra Kantanen | Mikko Rikala

Opening: Friday, 1 July 2022, 6 – 8 pm
Exhibition: 2 July – 3 September 2022
Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects is proud to present four artists from The Helsinki School who challenge pressing questions concerning the fragility of our ecosystem. In a world that is facing rapid changes in industry and capitalism, how can one reconnect with nature? What does it mean to slow down, to focus on the unseen, and appreciate nature’s temporality? These artists are among those few who remain in dialogue with nature, making a radical decision to treat our ecosystem with respect and to strengthen the human connection to it. They see that nature is unpredictable, asking if anything is predetermined. Rather than trying to control and suppress our environment – much like the large corporations fuelling climate change – Halso, Kannisto, Kantanen, and Rikala work with the unreliability of the landscape, embracing it to further cement our relationship with it.

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 | Untitled Women
Jussi Nahkuri | Every Passing Moment

Jussi Nahkuri | Every Passing Moment

Opening: Friday, 28 January 2022, 5 – 8 pm
Exhibition: 29 January – 23 April 2022
Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects is proud to present Jussi Nahkuri’s first solo exhibition, Every Passing Moment, which centers around his most recent group of works entitled Discussing Duration. The project exemplifies Nahkuri’s fascination for the complex theme of time and his passionate pursuit of perceiving momentariness. By exploring the range of possibilities of how to translate and shape the passage of time into physical forms, he has thereby found a very unique variation of conceptual art.

Framed. Activities for the Camera

Grey Crawford | Hilla Kurki | KwieKulik | Józef Robakowski

Opening: Friday, 29 October 2021, 5 – 8 pm
Exhibition: 29 October 2021 – 5 March 2022
Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 35, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects proudly presents the group exhibition Framed. Activities for the Camera, focusing on the correlation between performance and photography.
Performance as an art form, beginning in the mid-20th century, has been used and developed by contemporary artists through their use of photography as their primary tool for recording their ideas and actions. Understandably, performance art needs photography to be able to last. Yet, photography plays an even more important role, not only as a means for the documentation but especially when the performance is staged solely for the camera. This exhibition presents a selection of artists who recorded their actions specifically for this reason.
Framed. Activities for the Camera
Karl Ketamo | Among Other Things

Karl Ketamo | Among Other Things

Opening: Friday, 29 October 2021, 5 – 8 pm
Exhibition: 29 October 2021 – 22 January 2022
Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects is proud to present Karl Ketamo’s first solo exhibition, Among Other Things. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), Ketamo questions the relationship between objects of mass replication as opposed to the exclusiveness of the same object as a piece of art. One is produced and marketed on a global scale, while the other finds its exclusivity in a gallery. Ketamo utilizes a multidisciplinary approach in how he realizes his works, using photography, moving image, and sculpture for his various installations and exhibitions. Ketamo objectifies the ordinary by reinventing the normalcy of his chosen subjects. His works redirect our awareness of how these objects symbolize specific issues relevant in today’s society. A good example of Ketamo’s cross-referencing of social issues can be seen in his limited book, Landscapes of Authority (2016). Here, he uses images commonly printed on the pages of passports exemplifying nature and our relationship to it as a reminder that these documents of identity aren’t open borders for all.

Jaakko Kahilaniemi | Mining Your Business

Exhibition: 10 September - 23 October 2021
Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin
Opening: 17 September 2021


Persons Projects | Helsinki School is thrilled to present Jaakko Kahilaniemi's first solo exhibition Mining Your Business. The exhibition presents photographic works from Kahilaniemi‘s series Nature Like Capital (ongoing series since 2018), in which he explores the complex and contradictory relationship today’s exploitative society has with nature and the difficulties in finding a mutual path for a future. In his works he questions the role of the individual in the environmental degradation caused by global climate change.
Jaakko Kahilaniemi | Mining Your Business
Niko Luoma | For Each Minute, Sixty-Five Seconds

Niko Luoma | For Each Minute, Sixty-Five Seconds


Exhibition: 29 April - 28 August 2021
Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin


We are thrilled to present Niko Luoma’s solo exhibition For Each Minute, Sixty-Five Seconds. This exhibition features a selection of works from his Adaptations series, which focuses on his fascination with reinterpreting artworks from art history that have either influenced him or the way we think as a society about art. It is accompanied by his newest publication with the same title by Hatje Cantz and vitrines including not previously presented drawings and sketches.
Niko Luoma is one of the world’s leading abstract photographers and a key figure in the Helsinki School movement. He diligently works within the analog photographic process while his geometrical compositions are done without any digital manipulation. His method of working is intentional, and the composition of the image is well planned, yet he never really knows the final outcome until it’s printed. Luoma’s photographs find their contextual roots in how he combines cubism with constructivism to form his own style of abstraction. He pushes the parameters of how we perceive and interpret through his use of the photographic process as a means to create his own visual language.

Jari Silomäki | We are the Revolution, after Joseph Beuys

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Joseph Beuys’ birthday, Persons Projects is proud to present the exhibition We are the Revolution, after Joseph Beuys by Jari Silomäki, based upon and inspired by the famous work of Beuys La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi from 1972.


Exhibition: 12 March – 24 April 2021
Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 35, 10969 Berlin

Silomäki has built his career around a documentary-like approach in how he creates his own personal narratives. He has developed a style in interacting with his subjects that enables him to twist and expand the space between fact and fiction in creating his own conceptual language, where his hand-writing becomes part of the photographs. Silomäki follows upon Beuys’ idea that society could transform itself through art and creativity, thus setting the groundwork for his experiments with social sculpture that reflected the Fluxus attitude that "everyone is an artist”. Silomäki states, "Beuys is walking with great confidence towards the camera, suggesting that we, the viewers, could form a revolution if we joined him. Beuys was a political artist who considered art as a currency that could be used to change society. I somewhat reversed Beuys’ idea by creating and following my alter ego as an individual who becomes the object of the inevitable forces of history rather than its master. Like a tourist, I traveled to historically significant cities throughout the world that have suffered from political tragedies. But my artistic intention and experience was far different than that of a tourist. I was there to walk as many steps as there were victims due to the major political atrocities that made these cities historically significant.”

Jari Silomäki | We are the Revolution, after Joseph Beuys
Ville Lenkkeri | Looking Back with Closed Eyes

Ville Lenkkeri | Looking Back with Closed Eyes

We are pleased to present Ville Lenkkeri's solo show Looking Back with Closed Eyes, featuring a small industrial town situated in the Finnish countryside, once the home for him and his doctor father.

Exhibition: 12 March – 24 April 2021
Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

This exhibition is curated from a selection of works from his series Petrified Forest and Medical Records of a Small Town. Its primary focus is on the relationship between the artist and his deceased father through Lenkkeri’s memories, conversations, and mutually shared moments they once had together.
His photographs resonate with an authenticity that needs no post-production to capture the atmosphere and believability of the moment. They differ in tone and content from those of his other more renowned contemporaries, such as Gregory Crewdson, because he reflects his own life encounters or memories from his past. The protagonists in his images are primarily family members or close friends and his work crosses into the borderlands between the small-town mentality he grew up with and the countryside surrounding it. Each image forms its own story where the lines between facts and fiction blur, ushering in the surreal meeting the mundane. It’s a Finnish version of Tim Burton’s movie The Big Fish. He successfully bridges his father’s recollections from what they were into what he wishes to see. His personal twilight zone is where he can visualize his father’s aspirations and make them his own

Mikko Rikala | Paradigms of Chance

We are pleased to present Paradigms of Chance, Mikko Rikala’s second solo exhibition at Persons Projects | Helsinki School that continues his research into spatiality and temporality emerging from both philosophical and scientific nature related thoughts and practices.

Exhibition: 21 November 2020 – 6 March 2021
Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

The exhibition’s most prolific group of works A Year in My Pocket, features photographs that Rikala took over four seasons from specific places in the Finnish archipelago, where he focuses on the water in its various seasonal cycles. He subsequently prints and folds one photograph for each season and places it in his pocket, which he then carries throughout that season. Every so often he would pull out the trousered photograph to document its transformation and condition, then place it back into his pocket. Like the memories we keep in our heads, the image is transformed over time through its everyday use of being transported and carried.
Mikko Rikala is an artist who uses the photographic process as tool for gathering and recording material to help him in his philosophical pursuit of finding different ways to explore what’s behind the rational self. Rikala states, "I’m trying to uncover the relationship between what is seen as rational on one hand and what is perceived as irrational on the other.” His work is a reflection that merges mystical and philosophical thoughts through the empirical process of observation. Unlike his previous works, where he used the photographic process to record the now and then, these new pieces focus on the mysteries that lie beneath the unseen. He asks, "What are the possibilities for a person to observe and understand the world beyond the rational mind?”
Mikko Rikala | Paradigms of Chance
Santeri Tuori | Time Is No Longer Round

Santeri Tuori | Time Is No Longer Round

Opening: 11 September, 2020, 12 – 8 pm
Exhibition: 11 September – 14 November, 2020 
Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 35, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects is delighted to present Santeri Tuori‘s solo exhibition Time Is No Longer Round, opening on Friday, 11 of September 2020, on the occasion of the Berlin Art Week. The show will also be part of the European Month of Photography Berlin.
Santeri Tuori uses a camera to engage with the properties of nature and its power of change over the past two decades. Forests, skies, lilies, and wind are only some of the basic elements you might find in any Nordic landscape, and all become items of Tuori’s interest and observation. How should we value these essential features that make up the northern scenery is the fundamental question that lies behind Tuori’s work and his fascination with the passage of time.
To fully comprehend his approach is to begin by seeing how he integrates his life into his projects. An avid sailor, Tuori tours the Finnish Archipelago each summer, searching for new locations to begin and follow his measured cyclical observations. The small island of Kökar outside of Åland has been his primary place of interest.

Eeva Karhu | Shadows Within

Opening: 11 September, 2020, 12 – 8 pm 
Exhibition: 11 September – 14 November, 2020 
Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects | Helsinki School is thrilled to present Eeva Karhu’s solo exhibition Shadows Within, opening on Friday, 11 of September 2020, on the occasion of the Berlin Art Week. The show will also be part of the European Month of Photography Berlin.
Eeva Karhu is one of the new generation of artists emerging from the Helsinki School who use nature and its seasonal passing as their personal barometer to measure and translate our world by the power of its presence in our daily lives. She uses photographic process of layering one image upon another as her method for collecting the passage of time. This is most evident in her ongoing Path series, where she photographs the same walking route she takes from her home. After her walk, she compiles all the photographs together into one image to form the given moment they were taken in. Karhu continues this process throughout the year, creating her own visual calendar of time periods based on the harvesting of light from one moment to the next.

Eeva Karhu | Shadows Within
The Helsinki School – The Nature of Being

The Helsinki School – The Nature of Being


Exhibition: 27 June – 5 September 2020 
Venue: Lindenstr. 34 – 35, 10969 Berlin 

Persons Projects | Helsinki School is proud to present our group exhibition The Helsinki School – The Nature of Being. This show will take place in both of our spaces Lindenstr. 34 and 35, and will be accompanied with our latest publication from the Helsinki School series volume 6 by Hatje Cantz.
This exhibition focuses on how these selected artists from the Helsinki School use their internal compass to intrinsically measure and guide their perspective in interpreting the landscape they live in. Historically, Nordic culture abides by the power generated by the changing of the four seasons. Each of these natural time periods either by its wrath or grace, notches its mark upon its passing, leaving a reminder in its wake of how fragile our human presence is within it.

A Kiss Given by Time to Light

Opening: 23 – 24 May, 2020, 12 – 6 pm 
Exhibition: 23 May – 25 June, 2020 
Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin 

Persons Projects welcomes you to join us 23 and 24 May 2020 for the opening of A Kiss Given by Time to Light, a group exhibition featuring Timo Kelaranta, Niko Luoma, Pertti Kekarainen, Niina Vatanen, and Kira Leskinen. 
It’s a tribute to Timo Kelaranta’s influence as a mentor, teacher and artist in how his experimentations with abstraction has inspired one generation after another from the Helsinki School. This exhibition reflects upon how all these artists use the photographic process as a means to exercise their own sense for essentiality in defining how they collect time through multiple exposures inspired by sound, space, color and light. Looking back over the past thirty years, Timo Kelaranta must now be considered one of the first photographic pioneers in the Nordic region to explore the numerous possibilities of abstraction as a voice in visual poetry.

A Kiss Given by Time to Light
Timo Kelaranta | Strange Love

Timo Kelaranta | Strange Love

Exhibition: 14 March – 21 May 2020  
Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin


Persons Projects | Helsinki School is thrilled to announce Timo Kelaranta’s solo show, Strange Love. Whether it be in prose, poems or photographs, Kelaranta exercises his own sense of essentiality in how he defines one moment in time. Think of his photographs as words within his own visual poem. This group of images has been selected from the most recent body of works Numeritos as conduits for reflection.

Jyrki Parantainen | Poetic Realities

Exhibition: 14 March – 25 June, 2020 
Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 35, 10969 Berlin


Persons Projects proudly presents a collection of Jyrki Parantainen’s photographs that focus on his fascination with poetic realities. The selected works reflect Parantainen’s interest in how we define our internal viewpoints in order to understand our emotional horizons. Parantainen states "it’s much more than just a sum of shapes, colours, and light. It’s the universe with all its manifestations: grief, longing, dreams, beauty, world politics, environmental disasters, and violence. It’s about the past, the present and the future. The landscape is a canvas permanently open to interpretation”. These works form a collection of perspectives, where words intermingle with each other or rest alone upon the image, ushering in new meanings in how we identify, observe or experience a landscape within his conceptual context.
Parantainen uses his life’s journey as a mirror for finding the subjects of his interest. These visual metaphors can evolve out of his own personal relationships or historical ones he uncovers, forming a personal library of dreams and disappointments. The photographs he creates go beyond the horizon of where the land, water and sky meet, rather they draw their breath from the space behind the mind’s eye. He says, "the horizon is not just a visual convergence of the three elements, but a mental interface, the beginning of a continuously expanding room of dreams and promises”.
Jyrki Parantainen | Poetic Realities
Arno Rafael Minkkinen | Going the Distance

Arno Rafael Minkkinen | Going the Distance

Opening: 24 January 2020, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: 25 January  – 7 March 2020 

For the upcoming exhibition at Persons Projects / Helsinki School, we are proud to announce the solo show Arno Rafael Minkkinen - Going The Distance. The opening reception will also host the presentation of his last publication Minkkinen, 2019.
Arno Rafael Minkkinen is one of the most historical artist’s within the Helsinki School, as an artist, teacher, writer, and mentor as well as being a recipient of the Lucie Award. For over forty years he has been photographing his naked body. His self-portraits are a mixture of performance art, staged especially for the camera, combined with an intimate relationship with nature. His method of working has always been about testing his own personal limits and how far he can push the human body with all the physical risks he encounters in capturing himself within the photograph.

Sandra Kantanen | Smokeworks

Opening: 22 November 2019, 6 – 9 pm 
Exhibition: 23 November 2019 – 11 January 2020 

For the upcoming exhibition at Persons Projects / Helsinki School, we are proud to present Smokeworks, a solo show by Sandra Kantanen.
Sandra Kantanen has delved within the world of landscape photography for the past two decades. This fascination with creating her idealized surreal sceneries stems from her earlier student days, when she went to China during her master’s studies in 2000. Kantanen states: "I studied Chinese landscape painting and became completely obsessed with the idea of trying to understand their way of looking at nature. I found out that most of the holy mountains that they had been depicting for thousands of years were almost totally destroyed by pollution and tourism.” This notion of what’s real or not has been the driving force within Kantanen’s work ever since. 
Sandra Kantanen | Smokeworks
Abstractions

Abstractions

Exhibition: 26 October – 16 November 2019
Address: Lindenstraße 34, 10969 Berlin
Participating artists: Timo Kelaranta, Niko Luoma, Teea Saanio, Mikko Sinervo, Ea Vasko

Persons Projects | Helsinki School is thrilled to announce the group show »Abstractions« with Helsinki School artists Timo Kelaranta, Niko Luoma, Teea Saanio, Mikko Sinervo and Ea Vasko. The presented art works are united in the self reflective approach, exposing the nature of light and photography itself, while moving away from the concrete object into fascinating abstraction. 

Ville Kumpulainen | Eye and Idea

Opening: September 6 2019, from 6 to 9 pm
Exhibition: September 7 – October 12, 2019

In his first solo exhibition, 'Eye and Idea' Persons Project | Helskini School in Berlin, Kumpulainen continues his studies of the unseen by using his camera to capture new dimensions and visual actualities of mundane objects he treasures in his collection, from another point of view. He then sets out to find the intrinsic voices that lay within these objects by combining them with fragments and words he has collected from magazines and books over time. Kumpulainen states, "My body of work visualizes the unexpected and inconsistent ways of thinking artistically. Throughout the process of creation these open up to be discovered and sought after in an extraordinary manner."

Ville Kumpulainen | Eye and Idea
 Jorma Puranen | Icy Prospects

Jorma Puranen | Icy Prospects

Opening: 06 September 2019, 6-9 pm
Exhibition:
07 September – 22 November 2019

The Arctic is often associated with an idea of immensity, infinity and distance that is an invitation to discover Otherness and Elsewhere. It likewise becomes an instrument for the cultural definition of self. "Icy Prospects” is associated with new concepts of space, mobility and distance that have emerged in cultural studies. I was interested in the possibility of a cultural space created by different fates, places, histories and encounters, a fictive historical world. "Icy Prospects” is a kind of fabric of facts, fantasy, geographical imagination and intellectual landscapes.’

-Jorma Puranen

Illka Halso | The Museum of Nature

Opening: 28 June 2019, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: 29 June – September 2019

"I plan and visually construct buildings, which will protect nature from threats of pollution and what is more important, from actions of man. (...) when putting nature into a museum, you have to take under consideration the aspect of the audience/consumer. Nature becomes a joyride for tourists or a beautiful landscape turns into a meditative theatre show.”

- Ilkka Halso

Illka Halso | The Museum of Nature
Elina Brotherus | I Am Still Alive

Elina Brotherus | I Am Still Alive

Opening: Friday, 26 April 2019, 6 to 9 pm
Exhibition: 27 April – 22 June 2019

For this year’s Gallery Weekend presentation, Gallery Taik Persons will show a selection of photographs and videos from Elina Brotherus’ series Règle du jeu (Rules of the game), The Baldessari Assignments and Meaningless Work. The series, Règle du jeu, was first exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris after Brotherus was awarded the French Carte Blanche PMU prize in 2017.

Juuso Noronkoski | One Millimeter Away From Stillness

Opening: 22 February 2019, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: 23 February – 20 April 2019

"There exists a German word for describing the contradictory nature of experiencing time: Ungleichzeitigkeit, non- simultaneity. I think the concept is meant to help us understand our own relationship with the present as experienced by someone else. It also reflects those moments, which often occur when looking at photographs, when the past and the present float around in my consciousness and I can’t decide which one feels more immediate.”

-Juuso Noronkoski
Juuso Noronkoski | One Millimeter Away From Stillness
Sanna Kannisto | Wanderer, Observer and Conveyor

Sanna Kannisto | Wanderer, Observer and Conveyor

Opening: 14 September 2018, 6–9 pm
Exhibition:
15 September – 17 November 2018

Gallery Taik Persons is delighted to present Sanna Kannisto‘s second solo exhibition Wanderer, Observer and Conveyor as part of the European Month of Photography Berlin.

Sanna Kannisto works on the verge of experiences in nature. Sometimes that means windy weather on a rugged peninsula in Hanko, Finland, and at other times spending weeks in the rain forest on the other side of the Pacific. The force that urges her on is found in nature: birds, plants and landscapes. Sanna Kannisto has photographed animal, plant and landscape subjects over a couple of decades. She has developed her own methods of creating images, which are often titled taxonomically. 

Reflections: From Here to There

Rita Anttila | Elina Brotherus | Ulla Jokisalo | Aino Kannisto |  Anni Leppälä | Kukka-Maria Rosenlund | Miia-Mari Virtanen

Opening: Friday, 29 June 2018, 6 to 9 pm
Exhibition: 30 June – 8 September 2018

Gallery Taik Persons proudly presents it’s upcoming group exhibition Reflections: From Here to There, a selection of six artists who have all been associated with the Helsinki School, spanning four generations beginning in 1995.

This exhibition is a very personal insight into how these artists translate and process their feelings and memories into their own rooms with a view.

 Reflections: From Here to There
Niko Luoma | Content is a Glimpse of Something

Niko Luoma | Content is a Glimpse of Something

Opening: 27 April 2018, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: 28 April – 23 Juni 2018

On the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin, Gallery Taik Persons has the privilege and pleasure to introduce Niko Luoma‘s most recent works in the exhibition Content is a Glimpse of Something.

The title of the show stems from an interview between Willem de Kooning and David Sylvester from 1960 unfolding the method by which the painter approached his paintings prior to and during the process of realizing them. Luoma, who uses one of de Kooning’s bronze sculptures Head #4 as a subject piece in the exhibition, was drawn to the title by this discussion because of his own fascination for the process of doing, specifically in how it utilizes the act of trial and error as a way to unleash the unexpected. Luoma‘s uniqueness is based around his system-based experiments where the negative becomes a record for its own realization, for the compositions of overlapping planes of color and dimensionality. In his most recent series Adaptations, he reinterprets masterpieces from art history, spanning his inspirations from Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflower series (1887–89) to the iconic swimming pool paintings by David Hockney from the 1960s.

Riitta Päiväläinen | River Notes

Opening: 16 February 2018, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: 17 February – 21 April 2018

Gallery Taik Persons is highly pleased to present Riitta Päiväläinen with her solo exhibition River Notes.

Over the past two decades, Päiväläinen’s unique works have become internationally renowned through their idiosyncratic language and style based upon her deep sense for story-telling. Essentially, the visual imagery of Päiväläinen’s compositions can be boiled down to two elements: nature, and textiles. Combining nature and a poetic use of textiles, she creates a stage on which to reenact memories of their passing.

Riitta Päiväläinen | River Notes
Jari Silomäki – Framing the World.

Jari Silomäki – Framing the World.

Exhibition: 3 November 2017 – 10 February 2018
Opening: 24 November 2017, 6 – 9 pm

Gallery Taik Persons is proud to present Jari Silomäki's solo exhibition Framing the World. An Essay on the Organization of Experience.

For this project, Silomäki collected more than two-hundred personal stories written on online platforms from all over the world, from people completely unknown to him. He translated a selection of these stories into a series of photographs that are now on display in the exhibition. Together, they form a collective narrative, in which the personas behind the aliases begin to unfold. 

Hilla Kurki – Fallen Feathers (from the Phoenix series)

Opening: 15 September 2017, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: 16 September – 28 October 2017

In living a life there are very few guarantees, but experiencing loss is one emotional hurdle we all will face at some given point. How we handle it depends upon its nature, but the death of a loved one carries its own signature. It is a fundamental human experience that can bring solace for some and the loss of self for others. Rebecca Solnit once wrote, „to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like Arctic tundra or a sea of ice" (from The Faraway Nearby, 2013). This is the starting point in understanding Hilla Kurki‘s newest body of work Fallen Feathers (from the Phoenix series).

Hilla Kurki – Fallen Feathers (from the Phoenix series)
Nelli Palomäki – Shared

Nelli Palomäki – Shared

Opening: 30 June 2017, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: 1 July – 9 September 2017

Gallery Taik Persons is highly pleased to present Nelli Palomäki with her solo exhibition Shared

Palomäki’s photography, continuously pioneering the tradition of classic black-and-white portraiture, has established the artist among rnthe most celebrated to evolve from the Helsinki School and Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture over the past decade. Shared explores the complex theme of siblinghood, decipherable in its powerful, dynamic manifestations of human relationships and familial bonds. 

Marked Sites – Jaakko Kahilaniemi, Jyrki Parantainen, Anna Reivilä

Opening: 20 January 2017, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: 21 January – 19 April 2017

Gallery Taik Persons is highly pleased to present Marked Sites, our first exhibition in 2017, featuring works by Jaakko Kahilaniemi, Jyrki Parantainen, and Anna Reivilä.

The exhibition and its title refer to Rosalind E. Krauss’ essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field (1979), in which she presents the theory of the ‘expanded field’ to explain the development of the definition of sculpture in contemporary art. In her theory, she refers to so-called "marked sites” as a "combination of landscape and non-landscape.” 

Marked Sites – Jaakko Kahilaniemi, Jyrki Parantainen, Anna Reivilä
 Joakim Eskildsen – Roma Journeys

Joakim Eskildsen – Roma Journeys

Opening: 28 October 2016, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: 29 October 2016 – 14 January 2017

Ten years after Joakim Eskildsen completed his work on The Roma Journeys and after touring more than 30 venues, Gallery Taik Persons has the pleasure to present the project for the first time at its Berlin gallery.


Tanja Koljonen – Between Two Dots

Opening: 9 September 2016, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: 10 September – 22 October 2016

Gallery Taik Persons is pleased to present Tanja Koljonen’s solo show Between Two Dots as part of EMOP – European Month of Photography 2016 in Berlin.

A red line running through Koljonen’s photographic works is the critical inquiry and artistic negotiation of polar opposites and complementary extremes: reason and instinct, rules and chance, communication and alienation, exposure and concealment. Based on objets trouvés and fragments of texts and images as traces of human inscription, the artist’s work sees an increased dealing with language, and the visual, material potential of words and ideas. 

Tanja Koljonen – Between Two Dots
 Milja Laurila – In Their Own Voice

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?

Anni Leppälä - The light of other days

Opening: Friday, January 15, 2016, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: January 16 - March 5, 2016

Gallery Taik Persons is highly pleased to present Anni Leppälä with new works in her solo exhibition the light of other days in Berlin

Leppälä’s works draw landscapes of the interior. With their acute sensibility of color and power of composition, they speak beyond the representational realm of words. Her motifs function as visual signifiers-⎯non-verbal metaphors and symbols⎯that carry concealed, ambiguous meanings. They are to be grasped and experienced through tacit knowledge similar to an oneiric state of consciousness, rather than logical reasoning. 

 Anni Leppälä - The light of other days
Plane Adaption - Niko Luoma

Plane Adaption - Niko Luoma

Opening: Wednesday, September 16 2015, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: September 17, 2015 - January, 9, 2016

The past ten years Luoma has been continually working with entirely abstract visual content through the medium of photography. His method involves a calculated, analogue technique of repeatedly exposing a single negative to lines of light, sometimes up to thousands of times, thus generating what has been denoted as "abstract photographs of time”.

Photographic function becomes content itself: what Luoma’s works have in common is their self-referentiality, in that they point towards the moment of exposure -the process of their own creation- in medium-reflexive way. Though intricately systemized parameters and number sequences are determined by Luoma prior to the exposures, he never knows what the final result will look like. His works are constituted by their inherent tension of order and chance.

Ulla Jokisalo - How to be both

Exhibition: May 1 - June 20, 2015

Gallery Taik Persons proudly presents Ulla Jokisalo’s solo exhibition How to be both with her newest assemblages and installations.

The artist Ulla Jokisalo cuts, masks, embroiders and perforates image fragments. With needles, pins and thread she attaches and binds together parts of reality, creating her own surrealistic universe. Jokisalo is an architect of images, who through the use of cutouts, highlights opposites and contradictions. In her newest works, the artist mainly uses found and ready made image material, which she combines to create transformational stories about human life.


 Ulla Jokisalo - How to be both
 Displacement

Displacement

Opening: Friday, March 13, 2014, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: March 14 - April 24, 2015
Participating artists: Kalle Kataila, Tanja Koljonen Jaana Maijala and Mikko Rikala.
Curated by Maya Byskov and Terhi Tuomi

Gallery Taik Persons is proud to present Displacement, the first in a series of curated group exhibitions showing new positions by young artists working with (and around) the medium of photography.

The title of the show refers to the distance that exists between experience and memory, and the translation of one into the other. The works in this exhibition encourage the viewer to think about their points of contact with memory and their emotional and aesthetic experiences. The show questions how these points of contact are preserved in our minds and asks the question: is it possible to exist in two places at the same time? Sensory and finite encounters are articulated through the use of the photographic process with space for materiality in the form of sculptures, collages and film.

Jyrki Parantainen - Maa

Opening: Friday January 16, 2015, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: January 17 - March 7, 2015

Gallery TAIK Persons is highly pleased to present Helsinki School artist Jyrki Parantainen with a selection of works from his early series Earth (1989–1991).

Parantainen, who played a key role as to the Helsinki School during its founding years, continues to be one of the School’s driving forces. Always seeking to further his conceptual approaches and working methods in the production of artworks, Parantainen’s creative process has undergone significant transformations throughout his now over twenty-year long career. While older works were dedicated to photography and installation in characteristically large-scale formats, more recent works as shown in the exhibition Between Heaven and Earth (2012) departed entirely from the former medium and testified a new tendency towards small-scale objects.

A continuous red line in Parantainen’s oeuvre is the importance of conceptualization and preparation in producing a new work, both mentally and materially. Critical introspection and methodical accuracy are crucial aspects to this process, which Parantainen likens to writing a script for a film. The implementation of the work reveals itself as a stage on which personal emotional endeavor, precise technique, and perfect timing engage in a forceful intimate dialogue, palpably described by Parantainen as a form of "wrestling”.

 Jyrki Parantainen - Maa
 Aino Kannisto - Hotel Bogota

Aino Kannisto - Hotel Bogota

Opening: Friday, October 17, 2014, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: October 17, 2014 – January 10, 2015

Gallery Taik Persons is pleased to present the exhibition Hotel Bogota with previously unseen works by Aino Kannisto on the occasion of the 6th European Month of Photography in Berlin.

Aino Kannisto works within a photographic tradition that combines a documentary style with the dream-like vision of filmmakers. Kannisto uses staged photography as "a way to give meaning to life by sharing a part of the world which otherwise remains private". Her cinematically influenced photographs depict internal emotional landscapes with an eerie tension, a self imposed catharsis.

Maanantai Collective – Between the Flashes of the Lighthouse

Opening: Friday, September 12, 2014, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: September 13 – October 11, 2014

Gallery Taik Persons is highly pleased to present Maanantai Collective with its exhibition Between the Flashes of the Lighthouse in Berlin for the first time. The show displays selected works from the series Nine Nameless Mountains (2012–2013) as well as a new set of so far unexhibited works.

Maanantai Collective’s body of work is the product of creative processes pursued by "one common author and sixteen eyes”. The group of eight artists represents a young generation of Helsinki School exponents that questions and challenges the notion of authorship. It therefore comes as no surprise that individual names remain in the background of Maanantai’s public presence as a collective whole. Catalyzing the group’s initial formation in 2011 was the shared experience of a joint trip to the Lofoten Islands in Norway; its aim being "to escape North”.

 Maanantai Collective – Between the Flashes of the Lighthouse
 Santeri Tuori – Time present and time past

Santeri Tuori – Time present and time past

Opening: Friday, May 2, 2014, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: May 3 – June 21, 2014

Gallery Taik Persons is thrilled to present Santeri Tuori’s first solo exhibition in Berlin. The show exhibits photographs from the series Sky Prints (2011– 12/2014), as well as a video from the Forest series (2009).

Santeri Tuori is one of Finland’s leading contemporary visual artists. As an exponent of the Helsinki School, he has become well known for his innovations in merging the media of photography and video art. The combination of still and moving images in Tuori’s works weaves together multiply layered com- positions that present more than the mere sum of their productive parts. While the subjects of his series have various origins in classical genres of human portraiture (e.g. Bogeyman [2001/2004], 35 Minute Smile [2002], Karlotta [2003/2004]), traditions of landscape painting (as with the works now on display), or in more abstracted, minimalist depictions of nature and natural environment (e.g. Sea [2004], Waterfall [2006]), all have in common that space is never organized according to the straightforward linear logic of temporal order and movement habitual to our practices of seeing – not only in viewing nature, but also art.

Pertti Kekarainen: TILA/Spatial Changes

Exhibition: 15th March – 26th April 2014

Gallery Taik Persons is thrilled to present Pertti Kekarainen’s first solo show in Berlin: TILA/Spatial Changes.

Pertti Kekarainen’s series TILA (since 2004) has been evolving over the course of the past ten years and consists of some 130 works in total. This extensive scope conveys well the inexhaustibility of meanings that adheres to the Finnish word tila after which the series is named. In its primary sense, it describes an architectural space, a room, or an interior space inside of an object; moreover a space or distance between different objects. At the same time, tila refers to a conditional state of a phenomenon as well as certain state of mind. Its connotations reach into various life spheres of social, cultural, and political significance. Just as meanings of words are always construed anew relative to the things they signify, so do Kekarainen’s works remain in a constant state of flux. His TILA are elusive, open structures, through which the partaker may experience and make sense of his own understanding of space. Whereas the works embody formally static entities as flat, hung images, their three-dimensional depth can be perme­ated visually by the perceiver whose compositional comprehension of the images slightly rescales and refocuses with each new pictorial element that he comes across.


 Pertti Kekarainen: TILA/Spatial Changes
 The Return of the Real: Joakim Eskildsen, Olafur Eliasson & Adam Jeppesen

The Return of the Real: Joakim Eskildsen, Olafur Eliasson & Adam Jeppesen

Exhibition: 18th January – 8th March 2014

Gallery Taik Persons and Niels Borch Jensen Gallery & Editions are delighted to announce a collaborative exhibition featuring the works of three Danish artists: Joakim Eskildsen presented by Gallery Taik Persons, and Olafur Eliasson and Adam Jeppesen presented by Niels Borch Jensen.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Hal Foster’s book from 1996, ‘The Return of the Real’, in which Foster discusses the conceptual genealogies of the avant-garde that engage in a historical and social conversation. The notion of environment and our perceptions of it are at the core of this exhibition, explored through the sensibilities of three Nordic artists.

Niko Luoma – No Debris, No Ruin

Opening: Friday, November 1, 2013, 18.00-21.00 pm
Exhibition: November 2, 2013 to January 11, 2014

Gallery Taik Persons is highly pleased to present Niko Luoma’s solo exhibition in Berlin, Niko Luoma is concerned, ultimately, not with "what is in front of the camera”, but "what is inside of it”.

Focusing on the process as content, his works, based on a calculated, analogue technique of exposing a single negative to lines of light up to hundreds and even thousands of times, delve into the intrinsic qualities of the photographic medium itself. In their composite structure as multi- linear progressive expansions within space, Luoma’s "abstract photographs of time” can be likened to the experience of listening to a musical piece.

 Niko Luoma – No Debris, No Ruin
 Mikko Rikala | Towards Nothing

Mikko Rikala | Towards Nothing

Duration: September 20–October 26, 2013
Venue: Lindenstrasse 34, 10969 Berlin, 2nd floor

Gallery Taik Persons is highly pleased to present Mikko Rikala´s first solo exhibition in Berlin: Towards Nothing. "What are the possibilities of Man to observe and understand the world beyond the rational mind?

This is the essential question Mikko Rikala seeks to instantiate through his photographic work. Epistemological by nature, Rikala´s enquiry examines the tension between "seeing" – equitable with the realm of physics and its sizeable dimensions as a form of rational knowledge – and "perceiving" – a conscious moment of subjective experience that presents a form of potentially irrational knowledge.

The logic of the irrational is based on his assumption of their mutually inclusive relationship in that "rational experiments can result in the discovery of something irrational". Rikala´s ultimate incentive is to transcend the limitations of human reason and intellect, and in turn conceive and make graspable that what we, on this side, feel is the unthinkable, unimaginable beyond of incommensurable space.

- Shao-lan Hertel

Aixia Li | Hwanhee Kim | Ji Hyun Kwon

Exhibition: June 6–July 27, 2013
Address: Lindenstrasse 34, 10969 Berlin, 2nd floor

Gallery Taik Persons is thrilled to present a group exhibition with the young artists Aixia Li, Hwanhee Kim, and Ji Hyun Kwon, whose works present three different contemporary approaches to the cultural connotations of language and image.

 Aixia Li | Hwanhee Kim | Ji Hyun Kwon
 Nelli Palomäki at Gallery Taik Persons

Nelli Palomäki at Gallery Taik Persons

Exhibition: 27 April– 1 June, 2013
Address: Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

The two Nordic galleries, Niels Borch Jensen Gallery and Edition and Gallery Taik Persons, are thrilled to announce that they are joining forces in a shared exhibition space in Berlin.

For their opening shows during Berlin’s Gallery Weekend, Niels Borch Jensen will present print works by Tacita Dean and Olafur Eliasson while Gallery Taik Persons will show works by the Helsinki School artist Nelli Palomäki who recently showed her work in major solo exhibitions at Ordrupgaard in Denmark (alongside Mary Cassatt) and at the Finnish Museum of Photography, and whose book Breathing the Same Air just was released in February at the renowned publishing house Hatje Cantz.

Joakim Eskildsen – American Realities / Home Works

Exhibition: April 26–June 1, 2013
Address: Lindenstrasse 34, 2nd floor, 10969 Berlin


Gallery TAIK is thrilled to present a first insight to Joakim Eskildsen's most recent series American Realities (2011) and Home Works (in progress since 2005) in Berlin.
These series represent two different approaches in Eskildsen's work. While American Realities was initiated through a project with TIME Magazine and took less than a year to complete, Home Works is again one of the artist's long-term projects, like his well-known body of work The Roma Journeys.

 Joakim Eskildsen – American Realities / Home Works
 Tiina Itkonen - Ultima Thule

Tiina Itkonen - Ultima Thule

Exhibiton: 16 February - 20 April, 2013
Address: Bergstr. 22 Mitte, 10115 Berlin

Gallery TAIK is thrilled to showcase works from the Finnish photographer Tiina Itkonen for the exhibition opening on February 15, 2013.

The title of the exhibition refers to the artist´s search for her own "Ultima Thule", a term used to describe the concept of a place outside of the "borders of the known world", specifically in the Far North.

-Jenny Rosemarie Mannhardt

Elina Brotherus - Artists at Work

Exhibition: October 20, 2012 –January 19, 2013
Address: Bergstr. 22, Mitte, 10115 Berlin

Gallery TAIK is delighted to present the renowned Finnish artist Elina Brotherus with a solo exhibition in Berlin in relation to the Month of Photography 2012.

The title of the exhibition Artists at Work, refers to the corresponding series (2009) from which a variety of works will be displayed. Furthermore, a selection of photographs of Brotherus’ complete works will be presented. A reception will be held with the artist on Friday October 19, 2012. The exhibition is supported with a generous grant from the Finnish Embassy in Berlin, and during the exhibition the new monograph Artist and Her Model by Elina Brotherus will be released.

 Elina Brotherus - Artists at Work
 Authentic Music from Another Planet

Authentic Music from Another Planet

Exhibition: September 7 – October 13, 2012
Address: Bergstr. 22, Mitte, 10115 Berlin

Gallery TAIK is delighted to present the Finnish artist Mikko Sinervo with his exhibition "Authentic Music from Another Planet". Sinervo´s most recently produced series "Do the Stars Look the Same the Other Side of the World?" (2011-) is being shown in Berlin for the first time.

Through the use of various photographic techniques, the artist of the Helsinki School pursues an aesthetic approach seeking to provide possible answers to matters that engrossed scientists and laymen alike. The exhibition opening takes place in presence of the artist on September 6th, 2012.

Tanja Koljonen & Jaana Maijala: Repetitive gestures

Exhibition: August 4 – September 1, 2012
Address: Bergstr. 22, Mitte, 10115 Berlin

Gallery TAIK is delighted to present the Finnish artists Tanja Koljonen and Jaana Maijala with their joint show "Repetitive gestures".

It is the first time for the two young Helsinki School artists to be exhibited in Berlin. The selection of works displayed in the exhibition is based on the artists' dealing with the notion of gestural repetition, which in both cases is formulated in a highly individual way.

 Tanja Koljonen & Jaana Maijala: Repetitive gestures
 Sanna Kannisto – Close Observer

Sanna Kannisto – Close Observer

Exhibition: April 28 – June 23, 2012
Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin - Mitte

Gallery TAIK is delighted to present Helsinki School artist Sanna Kannisto with her solo exhibition Close Observer in Berlin.

In relation to Kannisto´s first major monograph "Fieldwork", published 2011 by Aperture, the exhibition gives a broad overview of her oeuvre. Selected works from her series "Close Observer" (2008-2010) and "Field Studios" (2000-2010), including many of Kannisto´s most recent photographs, are presented in addition to works from her series "Act of Flying" (2006) as well as "Private Collection" (2003-2006). The exhibition opens in presence of the artist on Friday, 27th April, 2012.

Eeva Karhu – While unseen

Duration: 9 March – 21 April, 2012
Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin – Mitte

Gallery TAIK is delighted to present the first solo exhibition with the Finnish artist Eeva Karhu in Berlin. The exhibition While unseen presents works from her series Impressio – Path, in which the artist compiles a period of time by accumulating the captured light and color. Reception will be held with the artist on Thursday, March 8, 2012

Eeva Karhu´s photographs create conceptual bridges that connect one day to another by collecting her patterns of movement as she walks from her home each morning: A visual diary that layers thirty images upon one another to form one month. Their combination composes a luminescent picture that feels itself resting somewhere between the impressionist paintings of Monet and Turner.

 Eeva Karhu – While unseen
 Ida Pimenoff – A Shadow at the Edge of Every Moment of the Day

Ida Pimenoff – A Shadow at the Edge of Every Moment of the Day

Exhibition: January 27 – March 3, 2012
Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin - Mitte


Gallery TAIK is delighted to present the first solo exhibition of Finnish artist Ida Pimenoff in Berlin. The exhibition A Shadow at the Edge of Every Moment of the Day presents works of the correspondent series from 2005–2011 that was recently published in Pimenoff´s first monograph by Kehrer.

The work of Ida Pimenoff is characterized by the sensitive inquiry of very personal feelings such as losing and longing. In her photographs the artist creates sublime sceneries that play with the ambiguity of emotions adhered in between imagination and reality. A dreamlike atmosphere emanates from Pimenoff´s works depicting intimate portraits, brumous landscapes and close-ups of commonplaces. These umbral silhouettes and reflections are arranged in strong contrasts of light and dark.

Saana Wang – Hujialou

Exhibition: October 22 – December 17, 2011
Address:
Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin - Mitte

Gallery TAIK is delighted to present the first solo exhibition of Finnish artist Saana Wang in Berlin. The exhibition "Hujialou" presents works of the corresponding series by the Helsinki School artist from 2008/2009.

The works of Saana Wang are a captivating combination of documentary and staged photography. In her series "Hujialou" - that refers to the same named district in the east part of Beijing - she depicts decrepit interiors that tell about past times. At the same time the artist documents the rapid changes of urban scenery when capturing the residencies that were once built for the working-class and followed the idea of conformance.

 Saana Wang – Hujialou
 Petri Summanen - Photographer´s Archives 2004-2011

Petri Summanen - Photographer´s Archives 2004-2011

Exhibition: 03 September - 15 October, 2011
Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin – Mitte

Gallery TAIK is delighted to present the first solo exhibition of Finnish artist Petri Summanen in Berlin. The exhibition Photographer´s Archives 2004-2011 presents a series of artworks that documents the artist´s process of giving up photography.

"One beautiful day on the other side of the world I walked to a mountain top to give up photography. The place turned out too photographic. In another country, on the edge of a jungle I found a shallow pond where I archived my camera, and took my last photograph as an evidence and as a recollection." writes Summanen in his personal statement about the series.

Marjukka Vainio – Kimono

Exhibition: July 1 – August 27, 2011
Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin - Mitte

Gallery TAIK is delighted to present the first solo exhibition of Finnish artist Marjukka Vainio in Berlin. The exhibition "Kimono" presents works from the series "Red" (2006-2010), "Birch" (2006-2010) as well as the still life "Zantedeschia II" (2010) by the Helsinki School artist.

The profoundly aesthetical works of Marjukka Vainio consist of the interplay between light and shadow, darkness and luminious colours. Vainio documents the world of plants not only to accentuate the beauty of their life forms but also to create a pictorial allegory for the cycles of life and death. Strongly inherent to her still lives is the idea of momentariness as it has been developed in Dutch "vanitas-stilleven" paintings since the 17th century.

 Marjukka Vainio – Kimono
 Wilma Hurskainen – No Name

Wilma Hurskainen – No Name

Exhibition: March 18–April 16, 2011
Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin

Gallery TAIK is delighted to present the first solo exhibition of Finnish artist Wilma Hurskainen in Berlin. The exhibition No Name presents works from the correspondent series from 2007 by the Helsinki School artist.

The work of Wilma Hurskainen is characterized by an intense exploration of the topics childhood and memory. To a greater extent than in her previous series "Growth" (2003-05) — in which the artist reenacts the pictures from her childhood of her and her sisters, and by doing so visually depicts the passing of time to the spectator — in the photographs from the series "No Name" Hurskainen explores the truisms of childhood memories.

Pernilla Zetterman – Turn Down Center Line

Exhibition: February 4 – March 12, 2011
Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin

Gallery TAIK is delighted to present the Helsinki School artist Pernilla Zetterman in a solo exhibition from February 4 to March 12, 2011. The exhibition takes place in cooperation with the gallery Swedish Photography.

The work of Pernilla Zetterman is characterized by an intense exploration of topics such as human control, discipline and the exertion of power. The photographs of the series "Close" result from her personal experience and deal with equestrian culture and its associated cultural codes. Using close-ups Pernilla Zetterman shows the details of the bodies of horses and riding utensils. The study of conflicting emotions is the starting point as well as the central idea of the series.

 Pernilla Zetterman – Turn Down Center Line
 Niina Vatanen - Grey Diary

Niina Vatanen - Grey Diary

Exhibition: 30 October, 2010 - 22 January, 2011
Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin-Mitte

Gallery TAIK is delighted to present the Helsinki School artist Niina Vatanen in a solo exhibition entitled Grey Diary.

Niina Vatanen´s Grey Diary documents a photographic search for traces, a quest for what is left of the mortal remains of someone dear to you. The result is a multifaceted, but also splintered portrait of the artist´s deceased stepfather that at the same time includes multilayered reflection on someone´s absence.

Anni Leppälä - Chapter IV

Exhibition: 10 September – 23 October 2010
Address:
Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin-Mitte

Gallery TAIK is delighted to present Finnish artist Anni Leppälä with the solo exhibition Chapter IV, presenting her latest works.

Anni Leppälä has been selected Young Artist of the Year 2010 in Finland. Leppälä (born 1981) is one of the most promising artists of the Helsinki School, whose artists in general aim to redefine the boundaries between the genres. In her oneiric still lifes, Anni Leppälä addresses the impossible wish that the photographic medium attempts to fix instants, to halt the world´s rotating in perpetual transformation.

 Anni Leppälä - Chapter IV
 Susanna Majuri - Water Ballads

Susanna Majuri - Water Ballads

Exhibition: 10 July – 28 August 2010
Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin-Mitte

Gallery TAIK proudly presents the first Berlin solo exhibition entitled Water Ballads by Finnish photographer Susanna Majuri who is one of the most well known representatives of the Helsinki School.

In Majuri's pictures, water plays a decisive role. It is motif, work material, and symbol all at once. In enigmatic scenes that recall film stills, the artist photographs strangers and sometimes herself in and by the water. Her fascination is fed first of all by the properties of water: it buoys people up; they are apparently able to float in it. Water is colorless and yet can adopt any and all colors; it can reflect light in various ways or absorb it; it can defamiliarize or distort contours.

Niko Luoma - Equations

Exhibition: 30 April – 27 June 2010
Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin – Mitte

Gallery TAIK proudly presents the exhibition Equations by Finnish photographer Niko Luoma.
Selected works from his two series Cronos (2007) and Symmetrium (2009) will be shown. Luoma´s interest is to visualize time with the means of analogue photography. Therefore he "draws" with light - which fits in well with the etymology of the word photography (gr. photos light, graphein to draw).

 Niko Luoma - Equations
 The Helsinki School - Urban Space

The Helsinki School - Urban Space

Exhibition: 30 January - 25 April 2010
Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin – Mitte

Gallery TAIK proudly exhibits a group show representing the Helsinki School artists Miklos Gaál, Kalle Kataila and Jyrki Parantainen.

Nelli Palomäki - Elsa and Viola

Exhibition: 31 October 2009 - 3 January 2010
Address:
Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin - Mitte

Gallery TaiK is delighted to present the solo exhibition of young Finnish photographer Nelli Palomäki, who is a member of the Helsinki School.

In her new series Elsa and Viola the artist deals with the tradition of the classic black-and-white portrait. Palomäki sees her portraits as a means of communication. She tries not to be only the person behind the camera but also to actively take part in the process of the picture making, to be present. This presence she also searches within the persons she takes pictures of. She concentrates on their gestures and the diversity of glances.The not completely controllable and independent status of the photographic portrait fascinates her the most: "In the beginning alike, but in the end completely different."

 Nelli Palomäki - Elsa and Viola
 Ville Lenkkeri - The Place of No Roads

Ville Lenkkeri - The Place of No Roads

Exhibition: 23 September – 25 October, 2009
Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin-Mitte

Gallery TaiK Berlin is delighted to announce the exhibition with Helsinki School artist Ville Lenkkeri.

Press release in German:
Die Ausstellung zeigt Aufnahmen, die der finnische Fotograf Ville Lenkkeri in der nahezu verlassenen sowjetischen Bergarbeiterstadt Pyramiden auf Spitzbergen gemacht hat. Die Inselgruppe im nördlichen Polarmeer verfügte über reiche Kohlevorkommen, so auch das bis vor einigen Jahren von Russland verwaltete Bergarbeiterstädtchen mit dem interessanten Namen „Pyramiden", das Lenkkeri nur mühevoll erreichen konnte.

Mikko Sinervo & Ea Vasko - Drawn by Light

Exhibition: 26 June - 29 August 2009
Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin

The photographic emulsion, plate or paper - is an unknown quantity, whereupon one can note with light, as the painter can with his implements.
-L. Moholy-Nagy, 1928

The pioneer of the abstract colour photograms had been already occupied by the same questions, which also distinguish the works of Mikko Sinervo and Ea Vasko: Light, colour and space. Different to Moholy-Nagy, these artists approach from the representational, transferring it into a borderland to abstraction.

 Mikko Sinervo & Ea Vasko - Drawn by Light
 Hannu Karjalainen: Young Artist of the Year 2009

Hannu Karjalainen: Young Artist of the Year 2009

Exhibition: 01 Mai - 20 June, 2009
Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin-Mitte

Hannu Karjalainen has been chosen in Finland as the artist of the year 2009. His works circle between video, photography and performance. In his videos and photographs he deals with the meaning of certain colors and with aspects of the portrait.

In the exhibition Karjalainen´s latest video installation Blackpool Pleasure Beach (2009) will be presented. On a grid of 66 squares painted on the wall with 11 colors picked from low budget airline companies (e.g. Easy Jet) Karjalainen projects a seascape video shot in Blackpool, the popular tourist spot in Great Britain. The installation is a constantly changing exploration of color - how it changes our perception of what we are looking at and what connotations it can have. Furthermore Karjalainen creates a contemporary motif of transience: low budget airlines that bring tourists to the beaches and who threaten at the same time the existence of these places because of the rising sea level.

Janne Lehtinen - Sacred Bird

Exhibition: 01 February – 25 April 2009
Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin-Mitte

Gallery TaiK is proud to present the solo exhibition by Finnish photographer Janne Lehtinen who is also a representative of The Helsinki School.

The artist born 1970 in Karhula, Finland graduated in 2002 as a Master of Arts from the University of Art and Design in Helsinki. His career has included a number of international solo exhibitions. Lehtinen´s work is held in several of the major international photographic collections and he is the subject of a forthcoming monograph Janne Lehtinen - Night Shift, that will be published in 2009.

 Janne Lehtinen - Sacred Bird
 Sandra Kantanen - Shadow Images

Sandra Kantanen - Shadow Images

Exhibition: 25 October - 30 November, 2008
Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin-Mitte

Die der Helsinki School zugehörige finnische Künstlerin Sandra Kantanen hat für ihre jüngsten Arbeiten überwiegend Landschaften, Stillleben und Pflanzen fotografiert. Die von Timothy Persons kuratierte Ausstellung zeigt erstmals Aufnahmen, die bei Aufenthalten der Künstlerin in China, Tibet und Japan entstanden sind.

Helsinki By Night

Exhibition: 5 April, 2008 - 11 May, 2008
Address: Bergstr. 22, 10115 Berlin-Mitte

Gallery TAIK is delighted to present artists from The Helsinki School with the group exhibition Helsinki By Night, presenting their latest works.

Helsinki by Night – Berlin a project by the University of Art and Design Helsinki will open three exhibitions – in collaboration with the Museum for Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki and the Berlin Biennale für zeitgenössische Kunst, which every two years has approximately 50.000 visitors at the opening weekend (held in Berlin-Mitte). The exhibitons will feature Pasi Autio, Hannu Karjalainen, Juha Nenonen, and Santeri Tuori at brandatmosphere, Ola Kolehmainen at Galerie koal and Jyrki Parantainen at KFA Gallery. Along with those coordinated openings Gallery TaiK will open an exhibition featuring Tom Hunter (Helsinki School professional workshop series). Alongside there will be shown four video artists from the Helsinki School and selected videos from the Kiasma collection. Furthermore there will be a private showing of Timo Kelaranta, Ulla Jokisalo and Pentti Sammallahti.
Helsinki By Night