The style of the two artists finds a crossing point in the utilisation of various fragments as building material for photo collages, sculptures, and text-based works. The image and text fragments appearing in the works have been collected from internet archives, old books, and traces of drawings. Word fragments serve as a poetic element in the exhibition and as a further voice alongside the images. New spaces of thinking open up between the physical works and the imagination proposed by the words. The artists engage in an intuitive dialogue in the exhibition, which helps to dispel the idea of a single author. In the shared home of the artist duo, the dialogue between the works started long before the exhibition found its physical form. The exhibition also features co-created works by Hannula and Kumpulainen.
The constant flow of photographs, their absurd reproducibility, and the velocity of the medium guided us to look for ways to slow down our co-existence with photographic material by layering the forms and gestures of image reconstruction through various intermediate stages. We have listened to the chatter of materials such as plaster and clay alongside photo collages and allowed dialogues to emerge between fragments of images, lost words, and sculptures. We took an interest in the nature of plaster, a material that solidifies quickly and is traditionally associated with the act of copying. We saw this as a parallel to the sudden imprint that a photograph stamps in the course of time. The malleable nature of clay, on the other hand, found a mirror in the ever-evolving essence of digital editing.
Our images have hands, they fumble around to find remnants of objects, materials, and treatments to place on their surfaces, sides, and insides. They draw in endless layers of traces. We strive to create a space in the exhibition where different fragments form visual sequences. The chitchat of images passing between us suggests paths that cross between the works. The exhibition contains notes on the processes of the creation of meanings, how they change, break, or condense between different images, pieces of text, materials, and objects. The processes of something new forming and something dissolving become key questions.
The exhibition and the work of the artists have been supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, and Kone Foundation.
Ville Kumpulainen (b. Rovaniemi 1988) is a visual artist from Helsinki who approaches spaces and concepts experimentally through producing images. He examines different visual realities through photographs, words, objects, and archival images. Kumpulainen graduated as a visual artist from the Turku Arts Academy in 2016 and completed his Master’s degree in Photography at Aalto University in 2019. The German publishing house Hatje Cantz published his book Out of Sight in 2017. His works have been exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions in Finland and internationally.
Eeva Hannula (b. 1983) is an artist working with text and photography from Helsinki. Her works combine photo collages, sculptural elements, and visual and written poetry. Through her work, Hannula likes to consider the limits of photography, the connections between text and image, and the transformations of digital and physical traces. Eeva Hannula graduated as a visual artist from the Turku Arts Academy in 2012 and completed her Master’s degree in Photography at Aalto University in 2017. Hannula has also studied Aesthetics and Literature at the University of Helsinki (BA) and Creative Writing at the Critical Academy in Finland. Since 2012, Hannula’s works have been exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions in Finland and internationally. In 2019, she published Amorphous Writings, a book merging visual and written poetry with images.
