HISTORY OF APPLES – Susanna Kesänen

Soft objects inside the house. Blankets, quilts and fabrics.
Sounds of apples falling to the ground in the night
The dimmed light of a table lamp.
A glacier melting in the distance.

Marking all the apples on the tree on paper according to the photograph. I stick the apple map on top of another photo and pierce the apple locations with a needle through the paper. I cut out the horses and the table lamp from their background. I reassemble the photos by drawing. Like the photograph, the outlines I have drawn refer to the past. Something has been seen, something has been here.

Reproduction, erasure and repetition are key methods in the works on show. I examine the conditions of becoming an image and make meanings in the material, the paper. The drawings and large scale collages are an attempt to outline how to belong to a world where nothing is certain.

In conjunction with the exhibition, I will publish a zine, The History of Apples. The unspoken illustrated booklet contains 27 pencil drawings on display. Also available at the exhibition are the comic book And 10 others I don’t remember, 2021 and the picture book Sadness, Death and Nature, 2022.

Susanna Kesänen (1983, Elimäki) is a Helsinki-based visual artist whose work combines photography, drawing and comics. Kesänen graduated from Aalto University’s Master of Arts in Photography in 2017 and her work often explores the relationship between recording and drawing with the camera.

Translated with DeepL.com