my heart cries for you Viipuri

2016-2017

Analogue photography and installation

Solo exhibition at the NODE gallery, Helsinki, Finland, 2017

my heart cries for you Viipuri was my first solo exhibition, presented at the NODE gallery in Helsinki in 2017. The exhibition presented a series of square-format black-and-white analogue 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, Finland and then Russia. After it became part of the Soviet Union’s territory as a result of the Second World War, Vyborg turned over time from a prosperous second-largest Finnish city into a small provincial border town in Russia saturated with decay. Through this project, I wanted to raise awareness of the situation in Viipuri and provoke 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.