SCOPE – Saku Soukka
Saku Soukka’s Scope Exhibition consists of a video essay, photographs, and a readymade-based installation.
The title piece of the collection, the video essay Scope (2020), consists of programmed photographs, text, and music. It deals with dissociative experiences and the fluctuation and fragility of the human mind and self. At the beginning of the work, “I” and “you” merge, after which the human mind wanders, drifts, and associates itself in surprising ways. The main character impulsively flies to different countries, performs various actions and thoughts, and receives and sends different messages.
Direction, photography, text, and editing: Saku Soukka
Music: Tatu Rönkkö
Photograph transitions: Matti Hyvönen and Saku Soukka
Programming: Matti Hyvönen
Duration: 23 min. 45 sec.
The photo-based works to be hung on the walls of the Scope collection are photographs by Saku Soukka (from 2012-2020), which he has distorted using artificial intelligence, except for two. He has selected certain parts of his photographs, after which the tool he uses has filled those selected areas with new pixel combinations, imitating or attempting to imitate the “reality” of the photographs – as if suggesting that the image could transform in the selected area instead of the camera’s proposal. The end results are often surrealistically twisted or disturbed.
The installation composed of readymade objects brings together technical communication devices or their parts used by modern humans and organic elements such as pieces of wood. Saku Soukka has worked on the technical devices using various methods, distancing them from their original purpose – usually rendering them visibly broken considering their original use.
The Scope works contemplate the human mind and the reality surrounding humans in a way that raises questions about authenticity and the nature of artificial intelligence.
The creation and presentation of the work have been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, and the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
Saku Soukka (b. 1982) lives and works in Helsinki. His works reflect the concepts of selfhood and otherness, as well as hybridity, and they usually emerge through photography, videography, and writing, sometimes also taking the form of readymade-based installations. Encounters and dialogues between the internal and external, stillness and movement, and the organic and industrial are present. He has held nearly twenty solo exhibitions in Finland and abroad and has participated in numerous group exhibitions.
Translated with Copilot