When making his works, Ylikoski has considered the themes related to performance, the performance that takes place in front of and behind the stage curtain, in which Ester also participated when she dressed up the head of state. Although Ester herself remains firmly behind the curtain, the traces of her work – carefully chosen scarves, matching ties and fitted suits – are present when different worlds meet during state visits, negotiations, dinners and ski trips.
Ester fascinates Ylikoski especially because he didn’t let himself be photographed and didn’t tell anyone about his life. Ester is an invisible figure in history, a mystery that is like an undeveloped negative for Ylikoski. After going through thousands of photographs and hundreds of film documentaries in various archives, Ylikoski has managed to find two video images of his aunt, which can be seen in the exhibition’s work Invisible .
Scarves is a video work in which the main characters are the scarves that Ester has kept – thrown away by others, given as gifts and bought by herself. In the piece, Ester tells her memories of the scarves that the artist recorded while going through her aunt’s scarf storages with her. You were not allowed to take pictures. The soundscape moves around the premises of Tamminiemi while the events of the outside world are carried inside: Nikita Khrushchev speaks at the UN, John F. Kennedy welcomes the president to America, and Kekkonen explores Finland’s neutrality policy. The work was inspired by a photograph by UA Saarinen from 1956, where a woman shakes her clothes on the balcony of Tamminiemi. Ester worked for Kekkosten between 1952 and 1986.
Maria Ylikoski (b. 1966, Ikaalinen) has studied photography at Turku School of Art and Communication and Högskolan för Fotografi och Film in Gothenburg. He graduated with a master’s degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2011. Ylikoski has previously worked on several video portraits and dealt with topics related to memory, storytelling and family. The starting point for making Ylikoski is most often a photograph or questioning related to the photograph, even if the end result is a moving image or an installation. The Ester invisible project started in 2020 with the support of a grant from the Kone Foundation and continues to this day. Ylikoski’s works have been exhibited at exhibitions and festivals both in Finland and abroad since 1995.
The exhibition and the artist’s work have been supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Center for the Promotion of Art (Taike) and Visek. Thanks also to the National Museum of Finland / Tamminiemi and UKK archive.
