Ville Lenkkeri | Looking Back with Closed Eyes

Ville Lenkkeri | Looking Back with Closed Eyes

We are pleased to present Ville Lenkkeri's solo show Looking Back with Closed Eyes, featuring a small industrial town situated in the Finnish countryside, once the home for him and his doctor father.

Exhibition: 12 March – 24 April 2021
Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

This exhibition is curated from a selection of works from his series Petrified Forest and Medical Records of a Small Town. Its primary focus is on the relationship between the artist and his deceased father through Lenkkeri’s memories, conversations, and mutually shared moments they once had together.
His photographs resonate with an authenticity that needs no post-production to capture the atmosphere and believability of the moment. They differ in tone and content from those of his other more renowned contemporaries, such as Gregory Crewdson, because he reflects his own life encounters or memories from his past. The protagonists in his images are primarily family members or close friends and his work crosses into the borderlands between the small-town mentality he grew up with and the countryside surrounding it. Each image forms its own story where the lines between facts and fiction blur, ushering in the surreal meeting the mundane. It’s a Finnish version of Tim Burton’s movie The Big Fish. He successfully bridges his father’s recollections from what they were into what he wishes to see. His personal twilight zone is where he can visualize his father’s aspirations and make them his own

The Helsinki School – The Nature of Being


Exhibition: 27 June – 5 September 2020 
Venue: Lindenstr. 34 – 35, 10969 Berlin 

Persons Projects | Helsinki School is proud to present our group exhibition The Helsinki School – The Nature of Being. This show will take place in both of our spaces Lindenstr. 34 and 35, and will be accompanied with our latest publication from the Helsinki School series volume 6 by Hatje Cantz.
This exhibition focuses on how these selected artists from the Helsinki School use their internal compass to intrinsically measure and guide their perspective in interpreting the landscape they live in. Historically, Nordic culture abides by the power generated by the changing of the four seasons. Each of these natural time periods either by its wrath or grace, notches its mark upon its passing, leaving a reminder in its wake of how fragile our human presence is within it.
The Helsinki School – The Nature of Being