Gallery Huuto

Jyri Ala-Ruona: HIIT Musings

In my paintings, insulation boards, electrical insulation and bales of animal feed are linked to the human body and its energy consumption. For example, sweat serves as a painted sign of the flows in the body. The word “HIIT” in the name of the exhibition is the abbreviation for high-intensity interval training and, when pronounced, also contains a reference to heat. I see exercise as an invigorating self-motivated activity and enjoyable waste of energy but also as a form of self-control that may include obsessive-compulsive behavior.

My works deal with compelling needs related to the consumption of energy, painting and exercise, compulsive repeated actions and the related outbursts. I create strange and exaggerated images of our relationship with energy and tools through which energy flows into our daily lives and through our bodies and changes them.

Panimokatu 1, 00580 Helsinki
Free entrance

Frans Nybacka: Goblin Geology, Troll Romance

As a child, when I looked at a moss-covered stone wall full of holes and complex structures, I saw a breathtaking multi-layered city of tiny creatures, their homes and mines, gardens and paths, endless possibilities.

The Goblin Geology, Troll Romance exhibition features made-up places and their inhabitants. The works are based on the exciting feeling that there is something very small in a large and complex environment. Imagination influenced by video games produces images of fantastic worlds whose stagnant warmth invites you to join an adventure in front of something remotely familiar, yet unknown.

The places depicted in the paintings can be simultaneously seen from many different perspectives, revealing more than just one side of them. The two- and three-dimensional spaces meet instinctively, forming an incomplete thought of each place with room to grow and wander.

Panimokatu 1, Kalasatama, 00580 Helsinki
Free entrance

Ripsu Hongisto-Salmi: Personas

It is good to have many personae, to make collections, sew up several, collect them as we go along in life. As we become older, with such a collection at our behest, we find we can portray any aspect of self most anytime we wish. However, at some point, most particularly as one grows into and past mid-life and on into old age, one’s personas shift and meld in mysterious ways. Eventually, there is a kind of ‘meltdown,’ a loss of personae complete, thereby revealing what would, in its greatest light, be called the “true self.”

(Author and psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women Who Run with the Wolves, 1992)

The works included in the Personas exhibition were created as I examined the questions of identity, roles and self. For example, I was wondering if one self is just an illusion. Perhaps I am a constantly changing representation of me, formed by the sensations, observations and memories of a specific moment. Is the process of finding oneself a pointless and hopeless effort? Is it possible that a person’s self is at the same time a subject and an object – an observer and the subject of observation. Or does this require at least two selves?

The Personas exhibition features colorful self-portraits that I took at home in Töölö. The persons in the images change rapidly, but I feel that they are all equally real and genuine.

Panimokatu 1, Kalasatama, 00580 Helsinki
Free entrance

Saku Kämäräinen:

KUOLEMA is a one-hour video work that includes all my unreleased songs from a period of ten years. A few years ago, I was very ill and when I got my diagnosis, my first thought was:
“What is going to happen to all my unfinished songs?” For some reason, one of my greatest concerns at that moment was that the songs would just stay on hard drives forever. So I started to develop a way to “release” them from the hard drives. This resulted in the work that covers a period of ten years from the time I started to make music to the moment I got my diagnosis. This takes one hour and includes 183 songs. One second corresponds to one day in my life. The songs start playing on the day they were made and are played at a normal speed from beginning to end. At the beginning, there may only be a couple of overlapping songs, but towards the end there are several because every year I have become more and more active.

The video part consists of an accurate spectrogram, creating a visual representation of the audio in real time, as well as the working titles and creation dates of the songs.

The songs playing at the same time may seem chaotic at first, but if you give it some time, the waterfall-like soundscape may offer a hypnotic and captivating experience. The work is a journey, in which the amount of audio content and visual stimuli increase towards the end.

Panimokatu 1, Kalasatama, Helsinki
Free entrance