Welcome to the opening on 23.5.2024 from 5pm-7pm!
Guided tour on Saturday 15th June 1pm.
It’s a little bit magic
Like a river of morning geese
In the new warm mountain
Where the stone face forms and speaks
I believe in you
Even when you need to
Recoil
Big Thief – “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You”
The water flows through us is an ongoing photography project documenting and imagining queer bodies in peaceful moments of joy: swimming in lakes and seas, floating in between identities and definitions, sinking into the bliss of being held by loving hands and gentle currents. Just like the forests and waters that surround them, In The water flows through us subjects are fluid, vast, and ever-changing.The water flows through us is an imagined fantasia, a paradise, a land of milk and honey. It is also hope, reality, and possibility. It asks the viewer to imagine a world full of alternatives to the dry and lonely existence under capitalism – a lush world of chosen family, community, and intimacy that escapes the norm.
The water flows through us is a carefully curated collection of moments. You won’t see the violent conversations at Transpoli, the struggle of finding hormones on the dark web, the weird looks we get on the streets. There is no room for that here. In the water flows through us, trans bodies finally get to dance. Trans bodies get to lie down in the grass and sweat into soil. Trans bodies get to kiss. Trans bodies get to pop sweet blueberries in their mouths. Trans bodies get to roll around in mud. Trans bodies get to laugh while peeing into a lake.
The water flows through us is an invitation. Through the soft installation part of the exhibition, the blissful moments captured in the photographs bleed into the gallery space, inviting the guests to join us. The installation offers a space to stop, rest, and surrender. Everyone is welcome to lie down here. To eat a snack, bring a date, cuddle up, or take a nap. To find support in the (human) bodies (of work) around you. To come play with us.
August Joensalo is a Finnish-Karelian lens-based artist, filmmaker and writer creating trans narratives that ask questions (and sometimes even give answers) about the nature of memories, time, embodiment, and play.
Using a variety of mediums, August imagines queer utopias and archives everyday moments, blurring the lines between the real and the imagined, between the past, future, and present. By documenting their personal and communal history of everyday queer life, August gives trans resistance and joy the care and space it deserves. Both literally and figuratively, the focus of August’s photographs is more often on the little droplets of water finding their way down a chest filled with joyful laughter, rather than said chest’s top surgery scars.
As a trans Karelian artist, August attempts to understand their own past and roots in a world that has blurred, altered, or completely removed people like them from its history books. With tenderness, self-irony, and playfulness, August’s photographic works lean into the unknown and the forgotten, creating spaces for feeling held, loved and understood for those bodies that also find shelter in the in-between.
