Henrik Pathirane’s exhibition “Naming Salts” has at its core the plurality of modes of perception, the life of the gaze. The exhibition features forms made with an Olivetti Lettera 25 typewriter on rice paper: a few words, small ink figures and other things.

In a literate society, morphemes and phonemes destroy the freedom of the line interpreted as a letter, with violence comparable to the act of naming. The letters in the exhibition just want to be and meet other lines without the burden of meaning. In this attempt to be abstract forms, they oscillate between figurative pictures, textures, and linguistic meanings. In the best case, the sway turns into vibration and the typewriter art puts the perception in a restless, unsettled position.

Henrik Pathirane is a Helsinki-based poet who is interested in the possibilities of exhibition-based literature and publication-based visual art, and the ways they mix.