In the Telegraph Gallery

My yearly ’enforced summer holiday’ is over for now, that is, I’m finished with my time as gallery sitter for the exhibition Pondering with Pines in the Telegraph Gallery on Harakka Island. This year the weather has been lovely, warm and sunny. The geese and the seagulls and the other nesting birds have calmed down; most of the nests are empty and the chicks are big enough to try to avoid humans and predators. There has been quite a lot of visitors on some days, like the Helsinki Day on June 12, while other days have been really quiet. Those days I have been sitting at my computer in the kitchen or walking around on the slopes enjoying a sense of leisure. 

Regarding the exhibition itself I am fairly happy, too. It is presented on a separate RC -page. The exhibition is simple, consisting of two projections, two works, or rather one work and a series of works, With the Reclining Pine 1-12. The first one, The Pine in the Park with 2-3-1, admittedly a strange title, is a rough time-lapse video (23 min) with three small images of me posing in relation to the pine inserted in a larger image of the pine. It is projected as a fairly large image with the sound audible in the room. I am particularly proud of finding a way to decrease the colour saturation of the images. The works with the reclining pine (between 6 and 17 minutes each) are projected as a smaller image and the sound is audible from two pairs of headphones on two chairs. They are very much based on talking, my conversations with the pine, and have been published as podcasts as well. See the playlist Talking to a Pine (HEL). Basically both works are examples of what I have been doing in the year 2022, in Helsinki. Compared with previous years and exhibitions in the Telegraph Gallery the new thing is inserting the image variations into the same frame – a technique I used first in video essays – and also the talking, of course. I chose these two works made in the nearby Kaivopuisto Park to emphasise the connection to Harakka Island, although there are many other works that I also would like to show, such as the ones made in Stockholm or on Örö last spring or why not the experiments in Reykjavik. It is nevertheless a luxury to be able to show something in such an easy manner, remembering the difficulty in finding gallery time in Helsinki, where you often have to apply years in advance. So the yearly ‘enforced summer holiday’ is in many ways a real treat.