Through the darkness, the knowledge that passes gains peculiar hues over time. The rover, scanning both ground and stars, is troubled by the history it was fed, while people, isolated in the aeroplane, try to interpret its increasingly complex messages.

When Andromeda and Milky Way Embrace is a fictional video piece by Appu Jasu. In it, the characters attempt to uncover what has transpired while simultaneously striving to perceive the barely comprehensible as possible. The work features untouched snowdrifts, stars, speech, cinefilm, and imagined scenarios. Stark yet meticulously crafted images and sounds reveal a reality where certain trajectories have reached their endpoints, and amidst the ruins, knowledge searches for new anchors.

Jasu’s video works traverse genre boundaries, akin to aeroplanes navigating between countries and time zones. In his art, he is fascinated by the possibility of capturing an aspect of the complex nature of existence—moments where societal forces and the physical world drifting alongside each other quietly tremble. The work’s title merges a cosmic event billions of years in the future with a 1997 pop song. The artist also feels a particular connection to the words of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), written over 150 years ago: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity”.

Appu Jasu (b. 1987) is a Helsinki-based artist working with video, photography, text, and sound. He earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2021 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Turku Arts Academy in 2014. His works have been exhibited at institutions such as the Helsinki Art Museum, the Finnish Museum of Photography, and the Salon Art Museum. His video works have been featured at festivals, including Doclisboa 2023 in Portugal and the WNDX Festival of Moving Image 2023 in Winnipeg, Canada. Jasu has also published a photography book, The Poetics of a Line (Kerber Verlag, Germany, 2018).

The exhibition and the artist’s work have been supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, Kone Foundation, Paulon Foundation, and VISEK.