THE GREAT ESCAPE I

The Great Escape exhibition is a critical comment on an era where altered reality is true and nothing can be trusted.

The exhibition is a story of how human beings have gradually become alienated from nature, how the landscape has become a stage, and how humanity has turned into role play. Kinnunen often appears in front of the camera herself, playing various characters that are aesthetically products of fantasy but often approach nightmares.

The human figure in Kinnunen’s photographs and videos questions the entire assumption of a natural human being. The requirement of naturalness is, in fact, seen as a way of exercising power from a constructed position that claims to represent the natural. In Kinnunen’s photographs lack of naturalness is present in a disturbing way, swimming precisely on the borderline between beautiful and horrendous. And that is why it feels like such an honest way of portraying this era.

We have strong preconceptions on what is natural and what is not. Despite this, the concept of naturalness is always culture-specific. Kinnunen succeeds in avoiding the imagery usually used to imitate naturalness so totally that her photographs could never be considered true.

However, Kinnunen’s relationship with nature and the reality around us is not free of complexities. Although her works criticise the requirement of naturalness, the simultaneously criticise the way our relationship with nature has become alienated. Where are we going to, and why? Are we running away from something?

Not all that glitters is gold. The strong physical presence and subjective experience of colour, typical of Kinnunen’s works, sometimes escalate to full-on surrealism, and her highly charged colour analogies challenge the spectator to engage in dialogue over what is beautiful and what is not, also posing the question whether it wouldn’t be more meaningful to consider what is true and what is not.

Veikko Halmetoja