Aalto University’s students take part in exhibition at the Finnish Museum of Photography
The new exhibition at the Finnish Museum of Photography showcases nineteen artists who are new Aalto University Master of Arts graduates from the Art and Media department’s Photography program. The works in the exhibition are part of the graduates’ final thesis projects.
Each graduating year represents an image of unique voices and spaces that is closely tied to contemporary phenomena in society and art. Over the course of their student years, previously unknown individuals become mirrors for each other, for whom art is a conduit that links the past, present, and future together.
‘The photographs on display use materials and techniques far beyond the medium’s traditional scope to examine, explore, and interrogate issues relating to the materiality and objectness of photographic media, human-and-nature relationships, constructions of landscape, connections between technology and culture, vernacular and institutional archival practices, personal histories and autobiographies, and political critiques of power structures and mechanisms of oppression. Photography is revealed through these explorations as an interdisciplinary medium, never cut off and always intimately tied to other senses, sciences, and artforms’, Rebecca Sandelin, one of the artists in the exhibition describes the diversity.
‘This exhibition is many things: a playground, a laboratory, a studio, a stage. Most importantly, it is a checkpoint, a step for many of us towards new challenges, possible failures, and even greater achievements.’
A selection of works in the exhibition:
Elisabet Cavén’s work “The Home Odyssey IX” (2021) is a looking glass into her own journey. Subtle humor and small insights are characteristics of her often home-built works.
Charlotta Rajala’s “Last summer, the month before, even yesterday lose their meaning as the memories begin to drain away” (2022) reflects on the value of disappearance, the meaning and problematic nature of memory and the concepts of silence and emptiness.
Carl Victor Wingren’s “Gloop 5” (2022) intertwines photography and installation. They work with natural biomaterials to question achievability and permanence. The works are presented in a state of flux; they transition between digital and material and wet and dry.