my heart cries for you Viipuri

my heart cries for you Viipuri was my first solo exhibition which took place at NODE Gallery in Helsinki in 2017. The exhibition presented a series of square format analogue black-and-white photographs and an installation of rubble. The town of Viipuri or Vyborg is a small place in today’s Russia. It has a long traumatic history and was influenced by different cultures: it belonged to Sweden, to Finland and then to Russia. After having become a part of the Soviet Union territory as a result of the Second World War, Vyborg turned over time from a prosperous second-largest city of Finland into a small provincial border town of Russia saturated with decay..

Through this project, I wanted to raise awareness about the situation in Viipuri, as well as provoke the discussion. In this series of photographs, I wished to convey feelings of loss and despair along with some hope. To me, the unpredictability of analogue photography, as well as the uniqueness of each frame, is exactly what makes it really precious and interesting.