Gallery TAIK proudly presents the first Berlin solo exhibition entitled Water Ballads by Finnish photographer Susanna Majuri who is one of the most well known representatives of the Helsinki School.
In Majuri's pictures, water plays a decisive role. It is motif, work material, and symbol all at once. In enigmatic scenes that recall film stills, the artist photographs strangers and sometimes herself in and by the water. Her fascination is fed first of all by the properties of water: it buoys people up; they are apparently able to float in it. Water is colorless and yet can adopt any and all colors; it can reflect light in various ways or absorb it; it can defamiliarize or distort contours.
The disarray the photos radiate is not least of all associated with photography's presumed character of proof that suggests: "Look, these things can happen." And indeed Majuri's photographs of at times unfathomable yearning are yet subtly composed and virtuoso in coloring.
In the water Majuri seeks counter or parallel worlds, places outside of convention, vanishing points and dream worlds. At the same time she indicates the ambivalence inherent in the utopia of "another" world: "The logic of color illustrates the fiction. The inner world constructs secrets to be seen. Inanimate things take on the role of the living. A picture of sorrow is a picture of hope."
- Jenny Rosemarie Mannhardt