Scene, 9th September – 2nd October 2016

Saana Wang w/Erica Nyholm,

Photographic Centre Peri, Turku, FI

Curator Pessi Rautio

An exhibition text about Scene exhibited withErica Nyholm in Photographic Centre Peri, Turku

The Past Is Here, Too
Neither photography nor video simply represents what is visible.

In the hands of Erica Nyholm and Saana Wang, photographic and cinematic technologies become instruments akin to X-ray machines or Kirlian cameras. The images they produce reveal something that lies behind the ordinary appearance of places, people, and situations. Their works inhabit an intermediate territory between the real and the staged, the discovered and the fabricated.

The images show things from the past, from afar. One aspect of what we see arises from the history of images themselves—from our shared visual heritage and the associations it evokes. Fleetingly present in the background are old paintings, family photographs from the early twentieth century, science-fiction films of the 1960s, fragments of anthropological cinema, films of the French New Wave, early avant-garde works, and scenes from chamber theatre.

Another aspect emerges from the carefully constructed silence within the images, a silence that allows emotion room to grow. When an image that appears clear and legible refuses to communicate a similarly clear piece of information or statement about the world, this ambiguity unsettles the viewer. We find ourselves uncertain about what kind of situation we are looking at. In response, we are compelled to draw upon the personal history of our own seeing.

It feels as though one were encountering things from a distance, almost for the first time—more intensely, more essentially than usual.

Nostalgia.

As if only now does one begin to understand something about the past.

Exhibition text by curator Pessi Rautio.

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