January 21 – May 24
Openings:
January 21-22, 2009
Symposium:
January 23-24, 2009
Helsinki, Finland
The 11th edition of the Helsinki Photography Festival opens January 21-24 in Helsinki, Finland. The four-day opening of the festival includes two main exhibitions, a two-day symposium, as well as other exhibitions and happenings at various venues in the Helsinki metropolitan area.Aletheia – Positions in Contemporary Photographies
January 23 – March 22, 2009
Meilahti Art Museum, Helsinki
Aletheia – Positions in Contemporary Photographies, comprising works by fifteen artists, revisits fundamental questions regarding contemporary photographic practices, the photographic medium itself, and their roles and impact within contemporary culture.
Many concerns regarding photography were put on hold as the shift from silver-halide processes to digital technologies took place, with the then wide-spread estimation that photographs would no longer be able to lay any special claims with respect to the realities they would depict or represent. Yet, although the digital shift is conclusive and irreversible, photographic media continue to pursue and challenge mimetic persuasion and photography’s descriptive or epistemological powers, even when aimed at the imaginary, remain central to both the politics and aesthetics of representation of our time. Indeed, as further explored in the exhibition Aletheia, photographic practices insist in very particular and complex concerns regarding the nature and representation of time, space, memory, identity, loss and death.
Participating artists: Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil, François Bucher, Pierre Gonnord, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Maria Hedlund, Nanna Hänninen, Alfredo Jaar, Liisa Lounila, Emily-Jane Major, Oscar Muñoz, Chino Otsuka, Marja Pirilä, Jari Silomäki, Michael Wesely, Richard Whitlock.
Aletheia – Positions in Contemporary Photographies is curated by Jan-Erik Lundström, director of Bildmuseet (Umeå University, Sweden) and Elina Heikka, director of the Finnish Museum of Photography (Helsinki, Finland).
Tense Territories
January 22 – May 24, 2009
The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki
Tense Territories is a large exhibition, made up of four solo shows. Mohamed Bourouissa, Sini Pelkki, Carrie Schneider and Sauli Sirviö, each in their own exhibition, consider ways in which the public and the private, or the global and the local, are defined in our lives, regardless of nationality.
In Périphérique Mohamed Bourouissa examines his own background and community in the housing estates of Paris. Sini Pelkki’s set of video works Statue-Concealment-Ceremony investigates the relationship between nature and the urban living environment. Carrie Schneider’s Hang on to yourself looks at the interlocking nature of independence and our dependency relationships with other people and our environment. Sauli Sirviö’s The Great Escape is a depiction of the artist’s own life as the story of a subculture. Each of these artists presents their own powerful, individual view of our existence, and proposes alternatives for new discourses of identity.
Tense Territories is curated by Aura Seikkula (Helsinki, Finland)
SYMPOSIUM
Knowing Photographs
January 23–24, 2009
Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki
The symposium examines current photographic practices and methodologies. It focuses in particular the resources of photographic knowledge, including complex renderings of time and space or the always current couplings of fact and fiction. As a set of related concerns, the symposium will as well address the ways that photographs engage unity or fragmentation, friction or correlation, past, present or futures in the relations they establish with the human world.
For more information about speakers and symposium registration: www.hpf.fi/symposium.html
Organizers:
Helsinki Photography Festival 2009 is organized by the Union of Artist Photographers in Finland/Photographic Gallery Hippolyte (www.hippolyte.fi) in collaboration with Helsinki City Art Museum/Meilahti Art Museum and The Finnish Museum of Photography.
The festival is a part of the Year of Photography in Finland 2009 – www.katse.org.
Helsinki Photography Festival 2009 has been generously supported by: Alfred Kordelin Foundation, Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Ministry of Education, National Council for Photographic Art, Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland, Swedish-Finnish Cultural Foundation, Centre culturel français.
More information:
For detailed information on the festival, press information and other enquiries please visit the website: www.hpf.fi
