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Artist
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Joel Karppanen
Joel Karppanen (b. 1993) is a visual artist, photographer, filmmaker, writer, critic and the artistic director of Oulu Music Video Festival. Known for long-term documentary photography series, experimental films and personal essays exploring themes of labor and class, his work has often been described as “historically-aware", "honest" and "sensitive".
Karppanen has received recognition including New Photo Journalist Award and Jouko Lehtola Foundation’s Young Hero Grant in 2017. His first monograph 'Finnish Pastoral' was published in 2018; the same year he participated in We Feed The World, a global photographic exhibition in London, featuring names such as Martin Parr, Susanna Meiselas and Graciela Iturbide.
In 2019 Karppanen had his first museum solo show in the Aine Art Museum. Furthermore his works have been exhibited in Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, KunstHausWien and Mänttä Art Festival among others. His latest exhibition in Gallery Halmetoja in August 2023 received critical acclaim. Karppanen's works can be found in various collections including The Finnish State Art Commission, The Finnish Museum of Photography and Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation.Originally from Northern Finland, Karppanen now lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.
Beyond Pitkäsilta (Metropolis)
Beyond Pitkäsilta (Metropolis) (2021–2023) concludes my Finnish trilogy that has previously included Finnish Pastoral (2016–2017) and Common people songs (2017–2020). The new photography series enfolds together my central themes: work, class and structural change.
I have photographed a transforming Helsinki that is no longer divided by Pitkäsilta but where class divides still exist. The proletarians of our time, food couriers, deliver artisan pizza to brand new skyscrapers. For a year, I documented a Czech food courier Krystof who is my age and a visual artist by his real profession. As part of the process, I worked as Krystof’s replacement: I delivered food orders for a month and donated my earnings to him so he could in turn focus on his own art. Nowadays, we are friends.
I photograph to understand myself and others. Finnish Pastoral was born from a need to redefine my relationship to the countryside when my life as an urban vegetarian then newly began to include a beef cattle raising stepfather. In Common People Songs, I reflected on my relationships to leftism and the working class movement. The point of view is affected by the idea of reflective nostalgia: one cannot rebuild the past but an analysis of the passage of time and a certain comfort derived from the memories can foster a sense of potential.As I worked on the Beyond Pitkäsilta(Metropolis) series, I realized I was depicting my grandparents through the food couriers. They moved to Sweden during the postwar mass migration and they found temporary employment as cleaners of Stockholm’s subways among other things. After returning to Finland, they cleaned stairways in Rovaniemi. That is where I also got my first introduction into a working life when I swept the floors as a 12-year-old with my grandma and -pa. Even though I loved my grandparents, I was ashamed of the fact that they were “merely cleaners”. Food couriers are often met with the same type of condescending attitude. Now I will no longer feel shame or condescend.
Artist duo Bela:Hagren has extensively explored traditional photography in its multi-layered past, from the technologization of the medium for the sake of science to its more creative uses. Bela:Hagren often address the complexity of storytelling of photographic history, which can’t be reduced only to images, because it is embedded in the cultural context, circulation, and economic infrastructure of the given time. More recently, they have been working on a project about the monopoly of manufacturing paper in the Eastern bloc and the toxic residue left behind by photographic production.
Joel Karppanen is a self-taught artist working with experimental photography to address class and labor issues and explore the deviousness of a hierarchical economy with issues of privilege, provenance, and access. In his most known work, Beyond Pitkäsilta (Metropolis) (2021–2023), he has worked with “donating” time, which is about putting himself to service or replace someone and giving them time so that they could have the same access or opportunities as himself for a limited period. In that specific work, he addresses how art is still for the few.
Nayara Leite is an artist and an advocator for the LBGTQI+ community across both Norway and Brazil. In her project In Search of Rainbows (2022) Leite explores the different flags displayed in the north of Brazil. While a growing number of Brazilian flags favored under the then-president Jair Messias Bolsonaro led to notions of nationalism, persecution, and homophobia, the number of pride flags on display had almost vanished, symbolizing growing discrimination for non-normalized individuals.
Sheung Yiu is a visual artist and a researcher focusing on how image sensitivity is increasing the complexity of algorithms but also bringing back old tropes of eugenics and phrenology, reactivating traumas of a colonial past based on provenance of geographies, genders, and other made-up exclusionary politics. (Inter)Faces of Predictions, or How To Read a Face (2023 - ongoing), is one such work where Yiu plays with these AI machines and their “learnings” to visualize their discriminative and presumptive politics.
Yujie Zhou is an artist who works with expanded photography, publishing, textiles, and performativity to contest censorship. They have worked on legibility and illegibility as forms of protest through language. Panoptic Segmentation (2021-ongoing) parallels the 18th-century disciplinary system, the panopticon, invented to make bodies more docile in prison surveillance system, and a similar system adopted in computation to break down objects into stratified readable components.