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Ari KakkinenWHITENESSES "Ari Kakkinen´s photographs feature places, spaces, objects and human beings covered by white cloth. Only a shape of what was there before remains. Identity is lost and form replaces appearance. - - Here however whiteness is not reductive but rather, pregnant with signification." Andrea Holzherr in The Helsinki School. New Photographs by TaiK "The gesture of sous rature ("putting under erasure") implies "both this and that" as well as "neither this nor that" undoing the opposition and the hierarchy between the legible and the erased." Jacques Derrida: Of Grammatology "In Blanchot´s reading, Orpheus (= the artist) does not desire to bring Eurydice (= the work) to the light of day, but to gaze at her in the darkness - a movement of desire, a necessary "failure" or "eclipse" at the centre of the art experience. Orpheus wants, not to make the invisible visible, but to see the invisible as invisible, which is an impossible task." Harri Laakso: Imaginary research in The Art of Research I am interested in photographs´ ability not to be defined, the way they escape the order of naming. The charm of photography lies in its fantastic capability of showing the multitude and virtuality in the smallest detail. Yet, there is an unquestionable link between the reality and the photograph as a shadow. A photograph is (as Maurice Blanchot describes images) a dead body, which resembles something but is still totally uncommunicative and obscure. I find the special importance of photography in this act of the most common turning to uncanny. For me photography is shaking and overwriting diverse identities and identifying administrative acts. Orpheus The Artist desires to see invisible as invisible. This is an imaginary and romantic project to know about no thingness that embraces our being. It is giving space for art to happen as art - to see through the necessary limits of the images, to be able to feel the other side of the work. Putting under erasure The act of putting under erasure is an act of posing questions about the value and the importance of the things and ideas we are much too common with. In my photographs there are still some proposals for space, reminders of art history and quotations of literature left. Some of them refer to my personal history, but they also cover the exact links. They suggest that personal might be something that is common to everyone. In the latest works (series of 30.000) veiling itself occupies the central position. Instead of wrapped spaces there are massive stacks of white handkerchiefs, which can be used to wrap (as I have done in Anterograde Amnesia). With this transition, the question of whiteness has become more important. This is heavily related to the grounds of western thinking as a mode of brightest light that makes possible to see and to know. To expose whiteness as whitenesses is a critical act. It makes visible the unneutrality of the neutral. Whitenesses are about silence, muteness, even despair of soundlessness. This refers to voices we are not to hear, leading to politics of representation. The series is converging serial imagery. It is a study of the border between art and politics, of the connection of the picture plain and the depths of referring. Becoming In these pieces a struggle between story and pure uncommunicative visuality is announced, as well as between inside and outside, trace and supplement, presence and absence. Thus I am turning the photographs to be about becoming. No more they are only monuments of lost time - no more simply naming and labelling the past. One of the strategies is the size of the print combined with shattering the identity of a photograph. Large prints are coming close to a sculpture or a statue. Strangely, monumental size is not about stability but about active sharing the actual space and place with the viewer. When a large photograph approaches to nothingness - refers to nothing and back - it short-circuits the representation. The work of art takes the place of actuality, the site, and it even turns everything else to a virtual non-site. I have felt this myself as I have been embraced by these no-more-images. The logic of language can´t attain the being of the no more image. No more, not yet - all the same. The time is out of joint. We encounter another kind of communication - total communion of being. Ari Kakkinen 
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