// PAINT. A Statement by Nanna Hänninen
Alienation, the changes in society brought by new technology and the global trauma of 9/11 in New York have affected my previous work in the beginning of the new decade. It was shown in various pictures on stacks of paper, boxes and other everyday life things having to do with organising and filing – helping to keep control. The work was shown as estranged landscapes taken with a long exposure time or with multiple exposures.
In my series // PAINT, I have another angle to question and challenge society. The series is dealing with the growing concern of climate change and our denial of it, both politically and ethically. On the other hand, the series is also a reflection on the alienation of the nature, its circulation and us humans. // PAINT is searching for the connection of the common surrounding world and its beauty.
The motifs are iconic pictures from the Finnish everyday nature and life-like trees by the water, flower buckets and people. But the created combinations of photographs that question the originality in the images push the work to another conceptual level. The series // PAINT connotes to antonyms like natural/artificial, true/false and concrete/ abstracts. The series is reflecting on the history of black and white versus color photography and the relationship between painting and photography. Abstract areas of paint, as synonyms for reality and ideas of it, are appearing to be more real than the actual scenes underneath. The process reveals and emphasizes the abstraction and artificial elements in the images. Through the abstraction and essence of acrylic colors the works states that life itself has become more and more artificial.
The latest images of this series have been made with the help of appropriation. By using historic images from the 19th and 20th Century of my home town Kuopio, the works bring another perspective to time itself – the past, the present and the future. All the original photographs by Viktor Barsokevitsch (1863–1933) and Karl Granit (1857–1894) are from the archives of the Museum of cultural history in Kuopio.