Katse Gallery features now Jari Silomäki’s most recent photographic series, Alienation Stories, draws a poetic and melancholy portrait of society as seen through the eyes of the individual. It describes defence mechanisms arising from the fragmentation and insecurity of life coupled with contradictory safety. Unlike Silomäki's previous documentary series on view in this exhibition, the photos in Alienation Stories are metaphorically staged glimpses of ordinary life. It is easy to identify with them. A middle-aged man in the street, disappointed in love; a young woman tormented by the fear of death, dressed in dark clothes and lying on a bed under a canopy of spikes; a young man building up his self-esteem bit by bit in the gym lifting weights. The past history of the war veteran shapes the landscape as young men size up each other in the street, their faced ruddied in the red light as if by flames. In the stories of the protagonists written over the pictures, the private and the public space intermingle and merge. Boundaries become blurred, layers of time intermingle.
The first-person texts stories avoid the sense of alienation. ”My window is by the street. I hear unsure steps, the wind blowing and the gulls. Then somebody shouting: "No, I won't". I sit in the easy chair. Lifting my hand. I look at it," is written over one picture in the hand of a 30-year-old man. The overlapping, layered texts and images reinforce the message that none of us is the other, or that all of us are. The picture could be portrait of any one of us.
One of the pictures shows a schoolboy sitting in his room in front of row upon row of trophies and medals. Is the boy perhaps a potential school killer? Silomäki says that Alienation Stories is about people whose mind creates an image that overlays reality. An alienated person is unable to perceive the motivation behind their actions nor their effects on other people. Causal relations become blurred.
City life, with its golden promise of anonymity and community, is one of the great loves of urban sociologists Richard Sennett. He observes that "Masses of people are concerned with their single life histories and particular emotions as never before; this concern has proved to be a trap rather than a liberation." Given that each self is "in some measure a cabinet of horrors, civilised relations between selves can only proceed to the extent that nasty little secrets of desire, greed or envy are kept locked up." Worlds created by the individual, such as the personal realities meticulously staged in Silomäki's photos, as well as emotions encapsulated into stories and obsessions can become reality, to seek a violent channel of release. Some of the photos were taken from behind glass. Someone is watching our reality – is it me or someone else?
What happens when we lose ourselves in a private reality which is no longer shared with others? Sennett once made mentioned Édouard Manet as an artist of "displacement", a concept that summarises the experience of the "other". Displacing familiar frames of reference, Manet's paintings give unexpected twists to established ways of seeing. In Bar at the Folies-Bergère, for example, it is optically impossible to be facing the barmaid directly while seeing her reflection to her right at the same time. In the upper right-hand corner of the painting, reflected in a mirror, we see the man the barmaid is looking at. The man cannot exist optically, either, because if he did, he would block our view of the barmaid – the viewer is standing in front of the barmaid. Thus the drama depicted in the painting says: "I look in the mirror and see someone who is not myself".
The surface of Silomäki's photos is a-shimmer with the insecurity, indecision and conflicting thoughts of the persons portrayed in them. The mood is almost palpably fragile and unreal. The linear representation of time is skilfully subverted by the pictorial surface. One picture shows both an arrested moment as well as the slow passage of light. Details emphasise the interlinking of temporal layers: traffic lights are simultaneously both red and green, the story about grandfather in the battlefield is reversed in time. Tomorrow is yesterday, yesterday is tomorrow, so what is now? The mood of alienation conveyed by Silomäki's large-format photos is also echoed in the smaller pictures on view.
Marita Muukkonen
Curator, HIAP
