27.10.-20.11.2022
Vernissage/ Avajaiset 27.10.2022 18:00-20:00

‘From Memory to Memorial’ takes its reference from the artists’ familial past around some historical events between 1920-1930 in Turkmenistan. While this decade was crucial for Turkmenistan to acquire a clearly defined territory under the Soviet rule, it came at huge cost to her ancestors: execution, confiscation of property, and displacement.

In 2017 she started exploring my familial history of that specific time period through her art practice and exhibited the final work in 2019 at B-galleria Turku. This current show is the continuation of the Turku show, however with a different angle. In Vejdani’s earlier show the focus was on studying the transmission of her familial history of that time within her family through memory, while this time the focus is on portraying the memory of the familial history of that specific time. Nevertheless this current work (a painting series and a video work) goes beyond memory by adding multiple layers and concurrence of different elements to construct a connection that is either temporal ( before and after), spatial or relational.

This project was supported by Finnish Cultural Foundation (SKR), and Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike).

Aishe Vejdani (b.1986) is a visual artist. Her favourite medium is oil paint, while she has been exploring other mediums such as video and film. Her first exposure to art was through her mother and grandmother’s Turkmen carpet making which familiarised her with intriguing geometric patterns and minimal yet rich colours. Later her first academic exposure to art was to English literature during her bachelor studies. Where she got fascinated by different methods of writing such as stream of consciousness of James Joyce, and absurd yet humorous writings of Samuel Beckett. It was during these years that she decided to shift to painting for her master’s degree with no prior experience in painting.

Today after more than a decade of practice in painting, she still takes inspiration from literary methods such as stream of consciousness by applying concurrence of different elements. This allows her to get out of the restrictions of essentialism where she can travel freely between multiple layers of her being and different styles of paintings. Within this frame she aims to construct a connection between her familial past, her two nationalities—Iranian-Finnish, her Turkmen ethnicity and her desire to experiment with different visual styles. Her practice also reflects her continuous relocation between Finland and multiple countries such as Japan, South Korea, Austria, Germany, Lebanon…during the last 7 years.