Persons Projects

Exhibitions

Searching for the Shapes Within

Exhibition: 21 November 2020 – 6 March 2021
Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 35, 10969 Berlin

The Art World of the 1960-70’s experienced a healthy transformation in perception with the emergence of Performance and Land Art. These new modes of artistic expression challenged the traditional white cube scenario of what art is and how it should be exhibited. Using our natural environment as its own stage for creative interpretations in whatever form, helped in laying the foundations in how art is perceived in this century.
Searching for the Shapes Within is a group exhibition presented by Persons Projects, that focuses on the earth as a common base for these different artistic interventions. What we see, breathe and stand on is part of the natural world we build our state of being from. Yet in reality it’s a combination of numerous elements and shapes all converging together to form an environment that’s in constant flux. What all these artists share in common is a mutual sense for experimentation that creates new frames for thought. Their works form a 50-year timeline, beginning in the early 1970’s up until the present, that engages in a joined dialogue that spans from California, Iceland, Finland, Poland to Israel

Mikko Rikala | Paradigms of Chance

We are pleased to present Paradigms of Chance, Mikko Rikala’s second solo exhibition at Persons Projects | Helsinki School that continues his research into spatiality and temporality emerging from both philosophical and scientific nature related thoughts and practices.

Exhibition: 21 November 2020 – 6 March 2021
Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

The exhibition’s most prolific group of works A Year in My Pocket, features photographs that Rikala took over four seasons from specific places in the Finnish archipelago, where he focuses on the water in its various seasonal cycles. He subsequently prints and folds one photograph for each season and places it in his pocket, which he then carries throughout that season. Every so often he would pull out the trousered photograph to document its transformation and condition, then place it back into his pocket. Like the memories we keep in our heads, the image is transformed over time through its everyday use of being transported and carried.

Mikko Rikala is an artist who uses the photographic process as tool for gathering and recording material to help him in his philosophical pursuit of finding different ways to explore what’s behind the rational self. Rikala states, "I’m trying to uncover the relationship between what is seen as rational on one hand and what is perceived as irrational on the other.” His work is a reflection that merges mystical and philosophical thoughts through the empirical process of observation. Unlike his previous works, where he used the photographic process to record the now and then, these new pieces focus on the mysteries that lie beneath the unseen. He asks, "What are the possibilities for a person to observe and understand the world beyond the rational mind?”

Santeri Tuori | Time Is No Longer Round

Opening: 11 September, 2020, 12 – 8 pm

Exhibition: 11 September – 14 November, 2020

Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 35, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects is delighted to present Santeri Tuori‘s solo exhibition Time Is No Longer Round, opening on Friday, 11 of September 2020, on the occasion of the Berlin Art Week. The show will also be part of the European Month of Photography Berlin.

Santeri Tuori uses a camera to engage with the properties of nature and its power of change over the past two decades. Forests, skies, lilies, and wind are only some of the basic elements you might find in any Nordic landscape, and all become items of Tuori’s interest and observation. How should we value these essential features that make up the northern scenery is the fundamental question that lies behind Tuori’s work and his fascination with the passage of time.

To fully comprehend his approach is to begin by seeing how he integrates his life into his projects. An avid sailor, Tuori tours the Finnish Archipelago each summer, searching for new locations to begin and follow his measured cyclical observations. The small island of Kökar outside of Åland has been his primary place of interest.

Eeva Karhu | Shadows Within

Opening: 11 September, 2020, 12 – 8 pm

Exhibition: 11 September – 14 November, 2020

Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects | Helsinki School is thrilled to present Eeva Karhu’s solo exhibition Shadows Within, opening on Friday, 11 of September 2020, on the occasion of the Berlin Art Week. The show will also be part of the European Month of Photography Berlin.

Eeva Karhu is one of the new generation of artists emerging from the Helsinki School who use nature and its seasonal passing as their personal barometer to measure and translate our world by the power of its presence in our daily lives. She uses photographic process of layering one image upon another as her method for collecting the passage of time. This is most evident in her ongoing Path series, where she photographs the same walking route she takes from her home. After her walk, she compiles all the photographs together into one image to form the given moment they were taken in. Karhu continues this process throughout the year, creating her own visual calendar of time periods based on the harvesting of light from one moment to the next.

The Helsinki School – The Nature of Being

Exhibition: 27 June – 5 September 2020

Participating Artists: Elina Brotherus, Ulla Jokisalo, Janne Lehtinen, Ville Lenkkeri, Anni Leppälä, Sanna Kannisto, Sandra Kantanen, Eeva Karhu, Riitta Päiväläinen, Jyrki Parantainen, Jorma Puranen, Jari Silomäki, Santeri Tuori

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.

A Kiss Given by Time to Light

Opening: 23 – 24 May, 2020, 12 – 6 pm

Exhibition: 23 May – 25 June, 2020

Participating Artists: Timo Kelaranta, Niko Luoma, Pertti Kekarainen, Niina Vatanen, Kira Leskinen

Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects welcomes you to join us 23 and 24 May 2020 for the opening of A Kiss Given by Time to Light, a group exhibition featuring Timo Kelaranta, Niko Luoma, Pertti Kekarainen, Niina Vatanen, and Kira Leskinen.

It’s a tribute to Timo Kelaranta’s influence as a mentor, teacher and artist in how his experimentations with abstraction has inspired one generation after another from the Helsinki School. This exhibition reflects upon how all these artists use the photographic process as a means to exercise their own sense for essentiality in defining how they collect time through multiple exposures inspired by sound, space, color and light. Looking back over the past thirty years, Timo Kelaranta must now be considered one of the first photographic pioneers in the Nordic region to explore the numerous possibilities of abstraction as a voice in visual poetry.

Timo Kelaranta | Strange Love

Exhibition: 14 March – 21 May 2020

Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects | Helsinki School is thrilled to announce Timo Kelaranta’s solo show, Strange Love. Whether it be in prose, poems or photographs, Kelaranta exercises his own sense of essentiality in how he defines one moment in time. Think of his photographs as words within his own visual poem. This group of images has been selected from the most recent body of works Numeritos as conduits for reflection.

Jyrki Parantainen | Poetic Realities

Exhibition: 14 March – 25 June, 2020

Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 35, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects proudly presents a collection of Jyrki Parantainen’s photographs that focus on his fascination with poetic realities. The selected works reflect Parantainen’s interest in how we define our internal viewpoints in order to understand our emotional horizons. Parantainen states "it’s much more than just a sum of shapes, colours, and light. It’s the universe with all its manifestations: grief, longing, dreams, beauty, world politics, environmental disasters, and violence. It’s about the past, the present and the future. The landscape is a canvas permanently open to interpretation”. These works form a collection of perspectives, where words intermingle with each other or rest alone upon the image, ushering in new meanings in how we identify, observe or experience a landscape within his conceptual context.

Parantainen uses his life’s journey as a mirror for finding the subjects of his interest. These visual metaphors can evolve out of his own personal relationships or historical ones he uncovers, forming a personal library of dreams and disappointments. The photographs he creates go beyond the horizon of where the land, water and sky meet, rather they draw their breath from the space behind the mind’s eye. He says, "the horizon is not just a visual convergence of the three elements, but a mental interface, the beginning of a continuously expanding room of dreams and promises”.

Arno Rafael Minkkinen | Going the Distance

Opening: 24 January 2020, 6 – 9 pm

Exhibition: 25 January – 7 March 2020

For the upcoming exhibition at Persons Projects / Helsinki School, we are proud to announce the solo show Arno Rafael Minkkinen - Going The Distance. The opening reception will also host the presentation of his last publication Minkkinen, 2019.

Arno Rafael Minkkinen is one of the most historical artist’s within the Helsinki School, as an artist, teacher, writer, and mentor as well as being a recipient of the Lucie Award. For over forty years he has been photographing his naked body. His self-portraits are a mixture of performance art, staged especially for the camera, combined with an intimate relationship with nature. His method of working has always been about testing his own personal limits and how far he can push the human body with all the physical risks he encounters in capturing himself within the photograph.

Ragna Róbertsdóttir | Configured Landscapes

Opening: 22 November 2019, 6 – 9 pm

Exhibition: 23 November 2019 – 29 February 2020

Persons Projects proudly presents Ragna Róbertsdóttir’s first solo exhibition Configured Landscapes. This collection of works, from the 1980’s to the present, reveals the diversity as well as the tactile sensitivity that Róbertsdóttir has continuously exhibited throughout her illustrious career. Her minimalistic roots reach back to the early 1980’s, beginning with her earliest experimentations with textiles and organic materials that were inherently common within her Icelandic environment. Róbertsdóttir’s approaches her work methodically, leaving each element used, enough space to define its own presence of being.

To fully appreciate the gravity of Róbertsdóttir’s art, one needs to merely image taking a walk into one of Iceland’s many austere landscapes. It feels less like a trek into somewhere and more like a journey to elsewhere. Her pieces project an overall sensibility that harbors both the power of its materiality combined with the lightness of its becoming, whether it be salt, stone or glass. In the interview for the newspaper Independent she said once "I always have done it very simply. Often the story is in the material."

Ragna Róbertsdóttir | Configured Landscapes