Tanja Koljonen works with found objects and fragments of text. Her rninterest is aroused by things that bear the marks of human usage and rnexistence in a special way. Mutual influence and constant interplay rnamong elements of unknown chance and possibility, on the one hand, and rnthe human properties of reasoning, intuitive action and freedom of rnchoice, on the other hand take on a prominent role in Koljonen´s rnartwork. In "On Constant Practice" (2011), the deck of playing cards, rnaffixed to a wall and photographed by the artist, is displaced from its rnoriginal functional framework. At the same time, the idea of playing rngains a new context of meaning: hung and aligned in a repetitively rnpatterned movement, the cards may be comprehended as a metaphor of the rnperpetual cycles, by which the course of our being as humans is rncontinuously defined. "On Constant Practice" reveals the game as an rnexistential experience, the goal of which lies in practicing adaptation rnto situations that are shaped by contradictory factors.

Jaana Maijala´s starting point as an artist are her drawings. Not rnaimed at the representation of objects in a conventional sense, they arern to be understood rather as immediate expressions of a current, rnexperienced reality. The drawing paper, covered completely with pencil rnhatches, and described by the artist as "filled" with "traces", rnevidences the presence of a lived moment embedded in specific time and rnplace. Through rhythmically repeated gestures of the pencil line, Jaana rnMaijala attempts to capture this moment. In a second step, the artist rntakes photographs of her drawings. In her view, the use of the rnphotographic medium allows for the possibility to arrest the continuous rnmovement of shadows and textures, the color, depth and gravity reflectedrn in the graphite of the pencil lead, and which forms that particular rnmoment. What is more, through the process of photographing a new rnmateriality of space is generated - that "what used to be pencil on a rnsheet of a notebook is now an illusion of mass" (Jaana Maijala).

-Jenny Rosemarie Mannhardt