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HANNU KARJALAINEN
(b. 1978 in Finland. Lives and works in Helsinki.)
Hannu Karjalainen is an award winning visual artist, filmmaker photographer, and composer based in Helsinki, Finland. Karjalainen develops his video practice from a grounding in photography and his training in the Helsinki School at Alver Alto University, Finland. Karjalainen’s experimental films, video installation work, photography and sound art have been shown in numerous exhibitions in Finland andinternationally, including UMMA University of Michigan Museum of Art, International Biennale of Photography Bogota, Scandinavia House New York, Fotogalleriet Oslo and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art Helsinki. Karjalainen won the main prize at the Turku Biennial in 2007, and was chosen as Finnish Young Artist of the Year in 2009. Karjalainen’s latest album LUXE was released by Berlin based Karaoke Kalk in late 2020. Karjalainen has collaborated with Simon Scott (of Slowdive), Dakota Suite and Monolyth & Cobalt among others.
Woman on the Beach is one of Karjalainen’s early video works – more like a photograph activated into a subtle poetic motion, rewarding the viewer for taking the time to watch it unfold. In subsequent work Karjalainen uses the medium of the moving image to reflect back upon painting and the material qualities of paint. Colour is an elusive subject matter. It is intangible and abstract as much as it is coded, branded and harnessed for different purposes. Hannu Karjalainen is particularly interested in how meaning is attributed to a colour, and how this mechanism can be exploited by re-contextualization, using colour and its supposed meaning as a critical tool to investigate the world around us. In an ongoing series of works that turn classical portrait photographs into moving color palets, Karjalainen again mobilizes the traditionally still image. Looking at painting through photography, its role becomes reversed.
WOMAN ON THE BEACH
2009, Video, 13 min 6 sec
Woman on the Beach, which was shown in MOMENTUM’s inaugural event in Sydney in 2010, is a photograph activated into a subtle poetic motion, rewarding the viewer for taking the time to watch it unfold. We see a woman, filmed with a focused on her immobile face, as she lies motionless on wet sand. The illusion of a still image is broken only by the intermittent rush of waves washing over her. The moving image then reverts into stillness. In this tableau vivant, Hannu Karjalainen subverts conventions of classical portrait photography to creating a striking tension between the still and moving image.
– Rachel Rits-Volloch
Nanjing Grand Theatre
2012, Video, 5 min 10 sec
Nanjing Grand Theatre explores the memory inherited in an architectonic site. The Nanjing Grand Thetre, a western classical style building designed by Chinese architects originally housed western cinema in the 1930s Shanghai. During the Cultural Revolution the building was dedicated to Beijing Opera and temporarily called Revolution Concert Hall. Now renamed Shanghai Concert Hall, the building is a prime location for classical music concerts. The massive construction plans in the Shanghai city centre called for the demolition of the building several times, as it was both in the way of a highway and a metro line. Finally a different solution was found: in early 2000s the building was moved from it’s original location by lifting the whole 5650 ton building up 3.38 meters and dragging the building to a new location some 70 meters southeast.
The video work is shot on the original site of the concert hall, where an elevated highway now passes through the city. Passing lights and shadows take human forms as we hear snippets from the soundtrack of the very first film screened in Nanjing Grand Theatre, Broadway (1929). The film adaptation of the musical is now deemed lost in its original form, with only an edited version made from separate silent and talkie versions existing.
Watch here the Spotlight interview with Hannu Karjalainen