BODY WORKS – Jaana Ristola, Sirkku Rosi, Anna Tahkola
Body Works is a collaborative project by three artists, consisting of paintings and video works that depict corporeality.
The exhibition portrays the body as flesh and skin: anonymous, unknown, intimate, and personal. Flesh is nameless but shared; it is the common essence of all people. Flesh is natural anarchy: the body carnivalizes existence by being uncontrollable, desiring, and knowing beyond what is presumed. The diversity of bodily images suggests life beyond definitions.
One’s body attracts and repels. The boundaries of the body are absolute, and the delineation is inevitable. In the movement of bodies, worlds, minds, and orders mix. The question is not about what is perceived as foreign or appropriate, but how we decide to relate to each body’s living space and its right to exist.
The exhibition celebrates the body as an aesthetic, political, and psychophysical image. Corporeality is the only way to exist.
The Body Works project is a dialogue between the three artists that began as existing works called the artists to collaborate. They engaged in theoretical discussions on the theme of the body while working both independently and in visual-verbal collaboration with each other. The artists hope the project will succeed in portraying a multi-voiced, powerful, untamed, and abundant body.
Anna Tahkola (born 1983 in Oulu) presents images of social roles, their representation, and the possibility of alternative ways of being. In the spring of 2015, she graduated with a Master of Arts in Fine Arts from the Aalto University Master’s Program in Fine Arts.
Jaana Ristola (born 1986 in Joensuu) is a visual artist whose work aims to open psychological human experiences into minimalist representations. Ristola’s starting point is often psychological, influenced by her background in psychiatric care and studies in psychology. She graduated with a Master of Arts in Time and Space Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in the spring of 2016 and has since focused on exploring the aesthetic manifestation of emotions both theoretically and practically, working in the Olento Collective, which develops emotion-based artificial intelligence.
Sirkku Rosi (born 1987 in Tampere) explores human flesh in her works as an experiential map and a boundary to the other in life’s absurd moments. A Master of Arts graduate from Aalto University in 2015, Rosi is interested in the ritualistic nature of everyday gestures, the carnival, and the connection between corporeal and visual expression.
Translated with ChatGPT