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
