Although Scandinavian countries are often stereotyped as places with a high standard of living, it is widely known that the world of the Finns is a lot more complex and intriguing than that. Juha Suonpää’s photo series titled “Holy Melancholy” focuses on the most plausible Finnish motif: Santa Claus. However, her Santa Claus is more of a stereotypical allegory of the Finnish national consciousness, who languidly lays in a bathtub, hides behind the curtains, flutters toilet paper in the breeze while running on a plateau, and passes his time amid water lilies. An example for the manifold nature of the exhibit is the series of Harri Pälviranta, “With Guns One Can”, which investigates the topic of violence with weapons by exhibiting portraits of notorious shooters whose dreadful deeds took many lives over recent years.
The motif of nature also manifests itself at the exhibition, but from a rather unusual perspective. Jaakko Kahilaniemi’s “100 Hectares of Understanding” series presents pictures he took on his own 100-hectare property. The shots of heaps of pine needles, and the precise notes of the exact size and weight of dozens of pine twigs, is seemingly just fussy and pedantic nitpicking, but in reality it’s the presentation of an experiment aiming to show how much nature could improve the life quality of urbanized city dwellers.
The artworks of one of the best-known figures of Finnish contemporary photography, Riitta Päiväläinen, are also on view at the exhibit. In her “Imaginary Meetings” series, she places old-fashioned clothing items and textiles into a setting of picturesque scenery, creating immensely estranged and lonesome scenes. Sara Horning’s photos in her “Our Daily Bread” series present food bags storing the knickknacks of people waiting in line at a food-distributing event.
Juuso Wasterlund approached the topic with similar sensitivity; his ironic pictures show a rundown disco, a couch with leopard-print sheets, a baby bathed in a sink, and other unpretentious moments that basically unveil what reality looks like in a Northern European country, displaying longing and gloom, human warmth, and regular dreams yet to be fulfilled.
On the whole, Finland is not nearly as sterile and predictable as we would presume, and if anyone ever wishes to travel to Northern Europe, a solid first step is going to this exhibition to gain real and interesting information about the country. “Independence Through the Lenses” is a traveling exhibit; Budapest is its first stop, and later in the year the fascinating photo series will also be on view in Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia, Lithuania, and Latvia.
