Enter through the frame. Fit within the square. A blue metallic surface, with leaning shapes and angles. Watch it like an ocean and wait for it to move. Stay where you are. Hide behind your hair.
Careful: edges can be sharp and objects shifting, looking something other than they are. Colours may have faded, run or lost their power. Altered, but the same for one that knows them. Stay in place to make it better. Don’t disrupt the composition, even if it asks you questions you can’t answer.
-Emma Hammarén
Sini Pelkki explores spatiality and the subjectivity of the gaze through photography and moving image. The installation in the Studio consists of photographs, presence of movement and a changing rhythm that is created in the space through associations, materials and the viewer’s presence. The exhibition also includes Present (2024), shot on 16 mm film, which continues Pelkki’s exploration of image, space and composition. The title alludes to a gift, a presence and presentation. The core of the work is about how different spaces can overlap and exist simultaneously, the dialogue between reflexes and control, choreography that uses improvisation and poetic text interacting with images.
Pelkki’s works take their form in the space they inhabit, in relation to one another and in the existing space. Together they form a reflective room in which it is possible to look in different directions. The elements and themes recur and repeat: the hands, cameras, body, movement. The gaze is being prevented, limited and controlled, but not the seeing.
Sini Pelkki (b. 1978, Helsinki) is an artist working with photography and moving image. She is interested in the subjectivity of the gaze, the limits and possibilities of seeing, spatiality and movement as well as spaces within spaces and the lives they inhabit. Pelkki gained a MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki (FI) in 2008 and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (UK) in 2002. The Finnish Art Association awarded her the William Thuring designated prize in 2014. Pelkki was shortlisted for the Below Zero Prize in 2017. Sini Pelkki’s works are in the collections of the Saastamoinen Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and HAM Helsinki Art Museum.
The exhibition is supported by the Finnish Heritage Agency, the Uusimaa Fund of the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the Arts Promotion Centre Finland. Pelkki’s artistic work is supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
