TIHEÄÄ VETTÄ / DENSE WATER
Forum Box gallery 2021
Dense Water intertwines the materiality of film and photographs with the materiality of the ageing body and transgenerationional bodily experience of being in-excess and excessiveness. The exhibition Dense Water presents three new works, Bond, 4k video, I’ve been bad, but I’ve been good too, film and Dark Room, installation.
Review by Sanna Lipponen in editmedia (in Finnish): https://editmedia.fi/tiheaa-vetta/
Saara Karhunen in Mustekala ( in Finnish): http://mustekala.info/blogit/mustekalan-vuoden-parhaat-2021/
My grandmother, born in 1924, unfitting to her own time and rural community, unintentionally broke her family, and herself. I feel something of her exists in me.
The material is filmed with an old super 8 camera from 1972, the same year I was born. Battery acid has leaked in it, there are short circuits, the film slows down or stops rolling. The film is also expired and faded. We are both ageing.
In spring 2021 my son and I spent three weeks in isolation, and these rooms became a cage for us two, the world outside the windows. I began photographing us imprisoned in our home with a pinhole camera I made of an iphone box. I developed the negatives in our bathroom with coffee, vitamin-c and soda, and fixed them with dense salt water.
When my son had the virus, I rinsed his nasal passage with salt water. I thought of the salty water inside our bodies, his, mine, my mother’s and grandmother’s. In the darkroom the dense salt water crystallized in two days as the water evaporated. Inside us the water flows. What if something of my grandmother still flows in me.
DARK ROOM
Installation, pinhole photographed with a smartphone cardboard box, coffee developer and salt fixer, red light
OON MÄ OLLUT PAHA MUT OON MÄ OLLUT HYVÄKIN / I’VE BEEN BAD BUT I’VE BEEN GOOD TOO, 8 mm film transferred to video, stereo sound, 6 min 12 s
Minna Suoniemi’s I’ve been bad but I’ve been good too intertwines the materiality of film with the materiality of the ageing body and transgenerationional bodily experience of being in-excess and excessiveness. The child-like uncanny voiceover narration addresses the child/woman protagonist’s foremothers, in direct maternal line and historically.
SIDE / BOND, 4K video, stereo sound, duration 5 min 10 s
Bond portrays a mother and son in what appears to be a wrestling bond that the mother repeatedly attempts to escape without succeeding. Closeness and battle intertwine in the protagonists’ bodily struggle. In her work Suoniemi draws parallels with the bodily, psychological and societal bonds between and within her protagonists and sets them in the continuation of historical mother and child images. Here, teenage and menopausal bodies tormented with hormonal changes negotiate their co-existence.