Eeva hannula: In The Fugue Of Gestures, Forms Arrange Themselves As They Wish 21.2. – 23.3.2025
Opening on Thrusday February 20th 5pm-7pm
Guided tour on Sunday March 16th 1pm.
Of all the compositions of time, I have ended up in this internal cave of mine, watching reflections—shells of reality that I cannot control—as they rain down from everywhere. Today, I think of different images: internal, external, and those still in the process of emerging. How they take up space. The humming gyroscopes of perception wear down the body like water eroding stone.
In Eeva Hannula’s exhibition In the Fugue of Gestures, Forms Arrange Themselves as They Wish visitors traverse a collection of photo collages, collage series, and text works. The exhibition explores the magical indefinability of the image and the various forms of visuality. The version of the exhibition shown at Photographic Centre Peri is a second iteration of a show previously exhibited at the Hippolyte Photographic Gallery in the summer of 2024. At Peri, new, previously unseen works are also on display.
The photographic collages presented in the exhibition are composed of physical collages created for the camera, digital images, and combinations thereof. They are constructed from various archival materials as well as the artist’s photographs and drawings. Hannula perceives these works as hybrids, in which she seeks to deconstruct and rethink traditional image types, meanings, and representations. Hands, other body parts, gestures, and their associative relationships with objects and traces often take center stage.
In her collage series, the artist relinquishes the primacy of a single image and surrenders to the unruly mass of images—an ever-evolving and shifting visual entity. The series consists of images that have been printed once, physically dismantled into pieces, rearranged, and photographed or cropped into new collages. To Hannula, they are improvisational visual streams of consciousness and cubist photographic writing, where physical fragments, shapes, and various traces compose an image in front of the camera lens. Through layers and variations, she sketches out the existence and boundaries of photographic material in her series.
The exhibition includes a text-based work in the form of a poetry booklet titled Instructions for the Impossible. The poems serve as guides for executing various concrete or impossibly abstract actions with images. Some poems also describe imaginative, surreal events. The text collection draws inspiration from Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit (1964). Central to the poems is the idea of the multidimensionality and freedom of the image as a concept. Additionally, the exhibition features text works that merge collage and writing.
Recycling and transforming photographic material through multiple printing phases is fundamental to Hannula’s artistic practice. She feels the need to slow down and digest the formation of photographic material, as the vast volume, speed, and flow of contemporary images compel a response to the fragmentation of attention. In Hannula’s working process, thinking occurs through mass and repetition—image-making becomes a journey with the eyes and hands. The writing of poetry seeps into photographic collages and vice versa. She perceives the construction of her works as a poetic and metaphorical act of thinking, a rewriting of photographic material that encompasses photography, drawing, writing, and collage-making.
Hannula is fascinated by the process of meaning-making—how meanings shift, break, or condense between images, texts, and materials. She experiences her body of work as a continuous gesture of writing, never reaching completion. Underlying the work is the notion of the image as an ever-forming substance, never possessing a single static essence. If the exhibition were to describe itself in words, they would be: fluttering, elusive, unfinished, imperfect, wandering, uncertain, emerging, probing, groping, clumsy, disobedient.
Eeva Hannula (b. 1983) is a Helsinki-based photographic artist and writer. Her work combines photographic collages with visual and written poetry, exploring the boundaries of photography, the interplay of text and image, and the transformations of digital and physical traces. Hannula’s work challenges rational logic and investigates the merging of the unconscious with the camera, texts, and the artist’s own process. Intuition, poetic thought, and embodied knowledge are key elements in her practice.
Hannula graduated as a visual artist from the Turku Arts Academy in 2012 and earned a Master’s degree in photography from Aalto University in 2017. She has also studied aesthetics and literature at the University of Helsinki (BA) and creative writing at the Critical Academy. Her works have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Finland and internationally, including Metronom Gallery in Modena, Italy (2024), Forum Box Gallery (2023), and the Benaki Museum during the Athens Photo Festival in Greece (2022).
In 2019, she published Amorphous Writings, a book merging visual and written poetry with images. The book was shortlisted for the international First Book Award by Mack Books in 2021.
Hannula’s artistic work has been supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the Kone Foundation. The exhibition has received support from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike) and the Finnish Cultural Foundation / Uusimaa Fund.
More information: www.valokuvakeskusperi.fi
