Saku Soukka, 2020The exhibition Scope features photography-based works, a readymade-style installation, and a video essay.
The works to be hung on the walls are my photos from 2015-2021. Apart from two of them, they have been distorted through artificial intelligence. I have selected some parts from the photos, and then used a tool to fill these areas with an imitation of pixel combinations, somehow attempting to imitate the “reality” of the photos — in a way of proposing that the image could turn into something other than the camera’s suggestion for the selected area. The end results end up crooked and disturbed in a somewhat surrealist manner.
The installation, composed of readymade objects, brings together contemporary technical communication devices — or parts of them — with organic elements such as pieces of wood. I have used different methods to shape the devices in order to remove them from their original purpose, often into a visibly broken state.
The exhibition’s namesake creation, the video essay Scope (2020), consists of programmed photographs, text, and music. The “I” and “you” merge at the start of the work, initiating a feeling that the human mind seems to navigate in an indeterminate state. Flying around on impulse from one country to the next, wandering aimlessly and also surprising oneself, taking care of various errands and thoughts, and receiving and sending out different messages.
The production and presentation of the body of work has been supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture Finland AVEK, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, and the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
Saku Soukka (b. 1982) lives and works in Helsinki. His works reflect concepts of the self and otherness, as well as hybridity. The works often find their forms through photography, video and writing, and at times as installations made up of readymades. Encounters and dialogues between the internal and external, stagnation and movement, as well as organic and industrial are present. Soukka graduated from the Time and Space Arts programme of Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts. He has held close to twenty solo exhibitions in Finland, Germany, and Italy, and taken part in several group exhibitions.
