The starting points of Jenni Haili’s photo installation Voyage Out are the emigration trips of her great-great-aunt Fanny and great-aunt Signe to America.

Fanny (b. 1894) was from Suurpero and Säiniö in the rural municipality of Vyborg. She moved alone at the age of 16 to New York, got married and worked as a housekeeper, her husband at sea. In the late 1930s she moved to California, married twice more until she died in 1969 in Fresno.

Signe (b. 1902) left from the completely opposite side of Finland, the west coast from Kaskis via New York to Boston at the age of 25. She found a Swedish husband, Alfred, whom she married in Manhattan. Alfred also worked at sea. Their last residence was in Malmö, Sweden.

In the timelines formed by the installation, alongside the landscape photographs taken by Haili, images from different sources intertwine: pictures from archives, the web, books, and created by artificial intelligence programs. The images in the work are re-photographed by using the historical wet plate collodion process.

The realization of the work has been supported by the Kone foundation and the Finnish Cultural Fund.

Jenni Haili (b. 1980) is a photographic artist who has an MA from the Aalto University’s School of Arts and Design. Central to her production is the theme of hiding and presenting, as well as photographic history through both techniques and content. Haili’s works have been seen in several solo and group exhibitions in Finland and abroad. In addition to her artistic work, she teaches mainly the analog photography processes at the University of the Arts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts.