Ville Kumpulainen explores the meanings concealed at the edges, in the backgrounds and empty spaces of images, as well as the visual dimensions of spatial experience. Fragments from found archival photographs and everyday objects, overlooked in ordinary perception, move from the margins and periphery of everyday life to the centre. The exhibition creates nested spaces and layers of meaning that are revealed layer by layer.
Visual interpretations of different spaces emerge in collages and object-based works, where abstract and representational elements meet. The presence of image fragments referring to the human figure also introduces a human scale into the works. They connect objects and spaces to the human experience, reminding us that all spaces are, in one way or another, lived spaces, experienced through the sensing body. Through a playful process, the exhibition unpacks the concept of space and its meanings.
The artist’s work and the exhibition have been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland. The exhibition is supported by the Finnish Heritage Agency.
Ville Kumpulainen (b. 1988, Rovaniemi) is a Helsinki-based photographic artist who explores different visual realities through photograms, words, objects and archival photographs. In his earlier work, he has examined our unstable relationship with the past and used photographs to create new histories for the present. Kumpulainen graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Turku Arts Academy in 2016 and completed a Master’s Degree in Photography at Aalto University in 2019. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Finland and internationally since 2014. In 2017, the German publishing house Hatje Cantz published his book Out of Sight.
