Heli Rekula
In Hemingway’s Garden
18 January–2 March 2014
Oslo Kunstforening/Oslo Fine Art Society
Rådhusgaten 19
N-0158 Oslo, Norway
Hours: Tuesday–Friday noon–5pm,
Saturday–Sunday noon–4pm
post [at] oslokunstforening.no
In Hemingway’s Garden consists of photographs, vintage press photographs and other archival material. The starting point for the new body of works is a landscape, the garden of the author Ernest Hemingway’s (1899–1961) home in Key West, Florida, a museum today.
Heli Rekula’s approach is strictly personal, as so often in her work. The artist first visited the Hemingway Home as a tourist. The place and the stories associated with it and the personal memories they evoked made Rekula return to the garden again and again. When Rekula was preparing the exhibition, the aesthetics of error emerged as a conceptual setting for the works. A technical error is here seen as a distillation of mans imperfection, of the incompleteness of life. Rather than a landscape, a picture is a reflection of a landscape.
In addition to raising issues around loss, absence and the value of failure, the exhibition discusses photography’s formal role in contemporary culture through the presentation of classic clear-cut art photography set against a documentary material.
Over the past 20 years, Heli Rekula’s work has been shown in galleries and museums around the world. In addition her films have been presented at screenings and international film festivals. In 2001 Rekula was selected for the main exhibition at the 49th Venice Biennale by curator Harald Szeemann, Plateau of Humankind. In 2002 she received the Ars Fennica Prize, nominated by Robert Storr. Heli Rekula’s award-winning work, In Between Worlds, consisted of a video about a young autistic person and a collection of landscape videos and photographs.
In the spring of 2005 Heli Rekula had an extensive retrospective exhibition, DESERT: Works from 1989–2004, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki. The same year she received the State Award for Photography in Finland. In 2011 Rekula was nominated for the Carnegie Art Award 2012.
Heli Rekula (b. 1963) is a Finnish artist, she has been a full-time professor in photography at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design since 2009. She lives and works in Bergen and Helsinki.
The artist book In Hemingway’s Garden will be published during the spring. Information about the book launch will be released at later date.
In Hemingway’s Garden opened in Finland at Helsinki Contemporary in August 2013. The exhibition has also been shown at Kabuso in Hardanger.
The exhibition is kindly supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland and FINNO, Finsk-norsk kulturinstitutt.A special thank you goes to Helsinki Contemporary.
