Photographic Centre Nykyaika, Tampere, Finland
Today was opening for two exhibitions at Nykyaika; Kristian Jalava’s “Invertible World” and Jukka Silokunnas “Entropy 2”. Both artists work is amazing, playful and very interesting.
Kristian Jalava’s work is done by exposing normal darkroom silver gelatin paper on a pinhole camera. Sounds normal, right? The thing is; the works are huge. Biggest print at show is about 3×4 meters (118 ” x 157″). The prints are the originals making all of them to be “negative”.
“In the photography project Invertible World, Kristian Jalava darkens various buildings into pinhole cameras and exposes large negative images directly on black and white paper. With his experimental photographic method, Jalava utilizes the static structures of society as part of the analogue image-making process. Jalava looks at the phenomena of a changing world from the perspective of buildings – in a shelter of structures that maintains slow time.”
I had a chat with Kristian about his work and these discussions are always eye opening and so fruitful.
Jukka Silokunnas exhibition was downstairs and he is making mostly video art, altough he had some physical objects also in display. His playfulness is so visible in his own person and in his work. I chatted with Jukka too and he told he want to use joy & fun as part of his work. And that works so well. I started to think myself how could I make uplifting art because we cannot have too much of it. Jukka’s work is amount materialism, dissasembly and .. junk. His work method is quite unique and totally interesting.
In both artists work one can see that all the hard work is needed to make such work. Nothing comes easy. Both artist work in very physical way; Kristian by exposing & developing enormous prints and Jukka by dissambling a van to small pieces. Crazy and nice guys, both of them.
I left the exhbition thanking myself for making myself to see the exhibition after a very rough two days. I felt like a new man after returning back to home. Well, of course big kudos to Nykyaika for being such awesome place. I feel blessed to live in a city with such gallery & photographic centre.