Mala Gallery, Warsaw,
8, Zamkowy Sq.
July 2-29, 1999
Rita Jokiranta - Mala Gallery, Warsaw, July '99
"Absences" - the photographic exhibition of Rita Jokiranta is a collection of a few colour photographs whose main topics are relations between a man and broadly understood landscape and industrial changes man introduces into his environment.
The artist who since her childhood has been living on the Baltic Sea archipelago of Aland Islands between Finnland and Sweden is in a natural way bound to maritime landscape. Her photographs are very subjective recording of psychic states originated under influence of vast spaces of sea and those above horizon. That is why her works include photographs of the skies full of clouds. This sky is always open in its character unlike the pictures which include people. The human figures or rather their silhouettes are locked in metal geometric constructions which without difficulty can be recognized as a standard and unified airport equipment. There are some gangways, stairs, mezzanines, passages. Human silhouettes appear as "jailed" between metal barriers of escalators or are set against an iron net. The human figure is nothing more than a anonymous outline which underlines its transitoriness and absence. The image of the sky photographed in different times, with clouds or without them supplies these works with stong contrast of meanings and enhances symbolism of emptiness.
The artist purposely does not present here planes or boats - here the human being encounters boundlessnes of air and waters. It seems like man is testifying to his absence in the face of nature's mystery.
M.G.
Rita Jokiranta - Mala Gallery, Warsaw, July '99
Rita Jokiranta - Mala Gallery, Warsaw, July '99
Rita Jokiranta - Mala Gallery, Warsaw, July '99
Rita Jokiranta at exhibition opening - Mala Gallery, Warsaw, July 2nd, 1999. Fot. Piotr Kubat/MG
Rita Jokiranta
Photographer, visual artist. Lives and works in Mariehamn in the Aland Islands, Finland.
Since 1989 she has had several private exhibitions in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium. Since 1984 she has taken part in group shows in Finland, Denmark and other Nordic countries, Poland, the Netherlands and Belgium.
She works often with photo-based, big-size installations dealing with questions of perceiving or trying out borders between archetypes and the stereotyped ordinariness of the subject and the image behind what is visible. They discuss the viewers’ relation to the image by questioning the reliability of memory. Viewers can combine their own reactions to the pictures, which act as counters in a memory game. She has also published a photo book, Seascape stories, in 1997. The pictures in the book create a kind of a log of an imaginary journey - on the way to somewhere beyond the horizon.
The exhibition "untitled (about transiency)" in Mala Galeria is a smaller version of the series "Absences" which Rita Jokiranta made 1998. It is an installation about the transiency of presence, the narrow border between absent and present. To be present physically but not mentally, wishing to be somewhere else, moments which are forgotten almost before they occurred, places which you do not pay any attention at all...
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