KirsiMarja Metsähuone:
They couldn't see the forest, 2002 |
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What shapes your identity? Where is your home?
Why do so many talk about roots, homeland and cultural origin just now?
Sharing a long experience of living abroad two Finnish sisters, KirsiMarja and Sarianna Metsähuone, employ different media and different approach but similar subject matter in their art. Both are dealing with issues of belonging, of re-finding and defining one's identity and origin.
Forest Room, a joint art project, uses forest as a metaphor to examine the meaning of home and identity in transit. The aim of the project is to conceptually situate forest room as an archtypal space anywhere on earth. To create an illusory place that is inherently private yet accessible to all.
Forests in ancient cultures were experienced as powerful places for contemplation where supernatural beings and forces dwelled. In archaic mythologies of arctic people different notions of symbolic trees, World Tree, Cosmic Tree and Tree of Life are known to have represented sacret retreats and continual regeneration of the universe. Trees have provided us with shelter, food, tools, paper, medicine, musical instruments, jewelry, vehicles, fire, even clothes. Trees in part keep the atmosphere clean and protect the earth from erosion. Today only about a third of the world's land surface remain covered with forests. The balance of the global ecosystem is being compromised. Are we willing to let the forests become the critical point at which the humankind finally destroys itself?
KirsiMarja Metsähuone has lived in the U.S and participated in numerous exhibitions there. She has studied at the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA, 1992, experimental film-making) and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Finland (MFA, 2000, media arts). Recurring themes in KirsiMarja Metsähuone's work are identity and body-related issues in multicultural environment. Her method of working is photo-based digital collage that challenges the imagination to reconstruct the fragmented, coherent or impossible event.
Sarianna Metsähuone has been living in Sweden since 1988 and has received both of her degrees (BFA 1997, MA 2000 ) from the School of Photography and Film in Gothenburg, Sweden. She has been awarded several grants and scholarships in Sweden, including grant from The Hasselblad Foundation and Robert Frank Scholarship. She has also been reviewed frequently in the Swedish press. Sarianna Metsähuone's recent photographic work utilizing birds eye view has emphasized her main themes: feelings of being outside, alienated and rootless and having no language.
Helsinki Festival in cooperation with Finnair |
