AN ATTEMPT TO CALCULATE INDIFFERENCE – Henri Airo
Photographic artist Henri Airo’s installation An Attempt to Calculate Indifference explores different ways of forming connections to the past and assigning meaning to events.
At the heart of the exhibition is the death of the artist’s loved one in a drunk driving hit-and-run accident in 2012. The starting point of the work is a mathematical simulation created by the police to model the crash. The collision that occurred eleven years ago had no eyewitnesses, and the driver was too intoxicated to remember anything. Thus, it is entirely impossible to ever truly know how the accident happened.
The installation, composed of photographs, archival material, text, and a photogrammetric simulation created by the artist, establishes a kind of dialogue between mathematical modeling and experiential knowledge. The work guides the viewer to reflect on the borders between grief and meaning, the personal and the public, the mathematical and the experiential. What kind of knowledge and meanings can mathematical models offer?
The production of these works and the artist’s research has been supported by Föreningen Konstsamfundet and the Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
Henri Airo
Henri Airo (b. 1996) is a visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland. He graduated in 2021 with a degree in photography from the Lahti Institute of Design. Airo is interested in human interaction, and his research-based artistic practice incorporates photography, other lens-based media, text, and archival materials. His works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, including at Amos Rex (Finland), Krakow Photomonth (Poland), and PhMuseum LAB (Bologna, Italy).
Photogrammetry is a scientific method in which mathematical data is extracted from photographs by calculating and interpreting distances captured within them. By measuring distances across multiple photographs, it is possible to generate three-dimensional models of spaces and objects.
Drone footage for the artwork: Ninni Lahti
Translated with ChatGPT