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The on-going Vieraalla maalla (In a Foreign Place) project is induced by experiences of cultural misunderstandings that affect the way we perceive images and the world we live in.
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In this fabricated outlandish world, traditional Finnish, Carelian and Sami customs and practices have been given a slightly odd twist. Not deviating beyond recognisability for recipients with the relevant cultural knowledge, the scenes toy with proverbs and obsolete customs, rendering the images absurdly strange to a viewer unfamiliar with the cultural heritage. Drawing from personal experiences of cultural alienation and misunderstandings — and my Carelian ancestry — the work invites the recipients to strive to decipher and locate the depicted world, thereby denoting the arbitrary nature of our interpretations so easily taken for granted.
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These images also take a critical look at the long-running strand of othering and exoticising representations of unfamiliar cultures and markers of identity that photography has perpetuated over the years, and regrettably still often does.
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Installation shots from the Circulation(s) festival 2016
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