24.9.–18.10.2026

Huuto IV

Photographic installation

As I have wondered at my ever-deepening relationship with pine trees, I have realized that I have spent much of my life surrounded by pine forests. Yet it is during the years spent in Honkamäki – my current, pine-dominated home – that the trees have come particularly close to me. At times, their quiet presence and stillness have caused hard-to-define restlessness or, as I grew accustomed to the silence, even a sense of boredom. More often, they have calmed, enlivened or challenged me, and on very rare occasions, as if rewarding my patience, they have seemed to open up the quiet surface they share with the surrounding world.

In Honkamäki, there is an old pine tree that I have observed for 15 years. This spring, I observed it from an entirely new perspective. Suddenly, it seemed to be especially present and unreachable at the same time. At times, it felt as though the pine was intruding into the space where I was. Its body felt comforting, threatening, intimate and unfamiliar all at once.
It simply was. At the same time, I thought of it as some kind of warning sign.

In the photographs presented in the exhibition, the space from which the pine has been observed is almost empty. Its angular banality frames and ultimately makes the old pine visible, even though the floorboard, the thermometer, the sink or the blind are undoubtedly as great a mystery as the pine itself. In the installation, the space functions as a kind of gap, a blink or a breath, in which an observation is both interrupted and continued, leaping across dimensions of time and place.

The pine escapes definition, classification and control, even when its silent surface is photographed or observed for years. The personal significance of the experience and fruitful theoretical approaches also leave it a mystery. And yet, sometimes, it reveals itself in a particular way. A View is an installation that seeks to depict curiosity towards another kind of body and its ambiguous silence. It is an attempt to listen to the pine from a space and time that is both distant and close, the same as and different from the pine’s body. In addition to observation and silence, the work has been inspired by embodied experiences, the cycle of the seasons, deep ecology and the age of multiple crises.

I wish to thank the Finnish Arts and Culture Agency and the Finnish Cultural Foundation / Central Finland Regional Fund for supporting my work.

Johanna Ketola (b. 1978) is a visual artist based in both Helsinki and Central Finland. She works with video, photography, installation, text and performance. Ketola graduated from the Time and Space Arts Department of Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts and from the Photography Department of the Lahti Institute of Design and Fine Arts, and she has also studied photography at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in the Netherlands. Ketola has been awarded the Central Finland Art Prize by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland.

Contact details
info(at)johannaketola.com
www.johannaketola.com