Ari Kakkinen's photographs feature places, spaces, objects, and human beings covered by white cloth. Only a shape of what was there before, the rooms, objects, or even human beings, remains. Identity is lost and form replaces appearance. In Ari Kakkinen's photographs, details and colors are veiled. Light and whiteness prevail. Here however whiteness is not reductive but rather pregnant with signification. 
Ari Kakkinen describes his approach as follows: "In these white images there is a struggle between narrative and a pure uncommunicative visuality. I am looking for the point at which the abstract image becomes a story, takes on communicative meaning. As no blank canvas can be painted, no pure abstraction can be achieved. But there is also the turning of the common into the uncanny resemblance of nothing."
The veiled worlds in Ari Kakkinen's photographs transmit vague, ghostly, even deadly feel­ings. The viewer only gets an approximate idea of the space and the different objects contained within it. One could find many references to the work, but the one particularly important to the artist is Jacques Derrida's quote on erasure, "The gesture of sous rature (putting under erasure) implies 'both this and that' as well as 'neither this nor that,' undoing the opposition and the hierarchy between the legible and the erased." (Jacques Derrida: Of Grammatology. Baltimore 1974. p. 320, n. 54).

Ari Kakkinen was born in 1966 in Iisalmi, Finland. He graduated as a Master of Arts from the University of Art and Design Helsinki (today Aalto University) in 2005.