Heavy Light
Hippolyte Korjaamo, Helsinki, Finland
15.8–18.10.2025
I follow the shrieking bursts of the midday vertical sun. Slowing toward evening, the light turns heavy and orange. The bluing night flees. Light particles that set out from our nearest star are what define us. I am moved by its brazen force, its unbelievable capacity to shape other matter, its insatiable will to give, its selfless love.
Heavy Light is an admiration of the endless hiss of photons, a wondering at the coming-together of different materialities. It has been a rewarded waiting.
I have photographed bodies that absorb light. From matter's point of view, these bodies have become filled with all the light that touched the space surrounding them. Particles of light that bounced off my own body, grazed a palm leaf, refracted in a glass of water — these have been absorbed into them. But what are these bodies, which reflect no light at all, to the camera? The material encounter between light-sensitive film and the object fails to take place. To the camera, the object becomes non-existent — the antithesis of the photograph.
These touches and relations remain outside the reach of our perception. What more sensitive or kinder postures of co-living might we assume?
I invited two colleagues into the work, Jussi Ronkainen and Antti-Juhani Manninen. I asked them to write companion texts for my works. Out of this living-with, slowed down forms have come into being. They have wavered, for a moment, into image surfaces and linguistic markings. I have tried to build relations of trust in which one does not so much finalize or arrange things, but where everything is governed by an unconditional striving to let things flow through the grasp.
Hippolyte Korjaamo, Helsinki, Finland
15.8–18.10.2025
I follow the shrieking bursts of the midday vertical sun. Slowing toward evening, the light turns heavy and orange. The bluing night flees. Light particles that set out from our nearest star are what define us. I am moved by its brazen force, its unbelievable capacity to shape other matter, its insatiable will to give, its selfless love.
Heavy Light is an admiration of the endless hiss of photons, a wondering at the coming-together of different materialities. It has been a rewarded waiting.
I have photographed bodies that absorb light. From matter's point of view, these bodies have become filled with all the light that touched the space surrounding them. Particles of light that bounced off my own body, grazed a palm leaf, refracted in a glass of water — these have been absorbed into them. But what are these bodies, which reflect no light at all, to the camera? The material encounter between light-sensitive film and the object fails to take place. To the camera, the object becomes non-existent — the antithesis of the photograph.
These touches and relations remain outside the reach of our perception. What more sensitive or kinder postures of co-living might we assume?
I invited two colleagues into the work, Jussi Ronkainen and Antti-Juhani Manninen. I asked them to write companion texts for my works. Out of this living-with, slowed down forms have come into being. They have wavered, for a moment, into image surfaces and linguistic markings. I have tried to build relations of trust in which one does not so much finalize or arrange things, but where everything is governed by an unconditional striving to let things flow through the grasp.
