Noora Sandgren at Photographic Centre Peri
Noora Sandgren
LET
Valokuvakeskus Peri Ry
4 October – 28 October 2018
Photography Programme’s student Noora Sandgren opens her exhibition at Photographic Centre Peri this month!
Please, read Noora’s exhibition statement below:
The exhibition both concretely and metaphorically builds itself around the garden and the processes of compost (Latin componere, to compose or bring together). The artworks are created from leftover materials, such as photographic paper from the 70s or the composting and image editing functions of the micro-organisms that worked diligently on one family’s food waste for a year. By allying herself with microbes, the artist makes visible the energy hidden in matter, which is easy to forget, even though nothing eventually vanishes but merely changes its form to cause effects in different configurations. The compost is a point of material resonance, swarming sociality, and molding. It is a picture of mosaic fibrillation and inseverability. The system requires enough oxygen, moisture, warmth, layering, compounds to function. Billions of farmers, enablers of life, live there. Thinking about the power and creativity of these tiny creators makes us curious, fills us with respect, causes us to shudder, because they remind us of the unknown organisms living in the inner landscape of our own bodies, organisms whose intelligence, together with random chance, guides our reality. Our dependence on invisible othernesses that affect everything inside and outside of us so exceeds our comprehension that it is not easy to admit, but we can still stand in awe and observe, and imagine, even presented with something so strange and withdrawn.
Using this slow, camera-less method the artist lays her head to rest on a sensitive photographic paper, for a long exposure. Warmth from the skin, sweat, tears and vapor from breathing erupt in color, breezes and weather conditions leave their marks while the sun draws its picture. The small insects, the rain, the sun, and the internal human waterways are the sculptors of the paper surface, a shared image is created, a mark of the process of becoming. In this method the photograph returns to its basic elements, light, time, and a reactive material, then again in the next phase of the scanner’s light further chafes the surface. The original images stay alive, vulnerable to touch, that which bends the photograph’s time
Also have a look at a text written specifically for the exhibition by art historian Riikka Haapalainen:
http://peri.fi/2018/10/03/11424/
Image: Snow paints 11.3.2018 (18 min), from the series Fluid Being, Noora Sandgren, 2018