THE BUS DRIVER AND JOFFREY – Aulis Harmaala

In the upstairs gallery of Poriginal, visual artist Aulis Harmaala presents paintings and object assemblages that explore gender identity from a microhistorical perspective. Harmaala paints opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and rhetoric, drawing from his own cultural environment from the 1970s to the present. His object assemblages consist of fetish-like ritual artifacts crafted by the artist, reflecting masculinity, femininity, and everything in between. These works deliberately evade categorization and verbal definitions.

Harmaala explains:

“My childhood male role models included both Joffrey from the Angelique films and an ordinary school bus driver. Following their example, I tried to be melancholic, boisterous, emotional, macho, and composed. Now I question how consciously or unconsciously my identity has been shaped. Analyzing my own experiences is challenging, as contradictions emerge—both in my own thinking and in the cultural mindsets around me. We all share the same African ancestors, yet our environments and cultures separate us. I never became the archetypal northern Finnish man that was being raised fifty years ago. Still, the world around me changed even faster than I did. This exhibition is a study of the diversity of humanity—its uniqueness, but also its limitations.”

Aulis Harmaala was born in Ranua in 1966 and currently lives in Helsinki. He graduated from Kankaanpää School of Fine Arts in 1994 and earned a Master of Arts degree from Aalto University in 2011. In recent years, his work has included paintings, object assemblages, installations, and participatory elements. Many of his pieces extend beyond visual art, serving as tools for direct discussion and interaction. Harmaala sees art as observation, thought, dialogue, and influence.

His works have been exhibited in Helsinki at Gallery Huuto and MUU Kaapeli, at the Turku Biennial (2015), and at the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition in Copenhagen (2017).

Translated with ChatGPT