6–29 June 2025
Photographic Gallery Hippolyte

The works in Kristiina Mäenpää’s Lunar Caustic have emerged at the points of contact between earth and image, through analogue photographic techniques and sculptural methods. The exhibition’s title refers to the informal name for silver nitrate, a fundamental component of analogue photography. Silver salts give photographs their light sensitivity, and thereby the ability to make time visible. The works originate from the ever-elusive nature of time, which arranges matter into fleeting forms, images, and ledges. Rather than a fixed presentation, both the photograph and the exhibition take shape bound to temporality — dialogues between materials and meanings.

The exhibition approaches photographic imagery as traces of time left in soil and stone formations––a continuation of the mark made by light on a photosensitive surface. The process of image-making is paralleled with the slow transformations unfolding in the landscape. The works are grounded in the bedrock of Finland, one of the oldest geological formations in the world. Its distinct features include well-preserved traces of ice ages brought about by ancient climate shifts. 

The sculptural elements of the work Slow Waves are based on moulds taken from shoreline rocks smoothed by glacial masses. As the ice moved, loose stones rotating within it etched their paths into the bedrock. Light-Worn Cliffs consists of lumen prints – photographs created without a camera. In them, unfixed photographic paper gradually darkens under the influence of ambient light, until the representational image eventually disappears from view. Also featured in the exhibition, the light-sensitive film used in the work Deep Exhale has been exposed to radon radiation from the earth—a deep exhalation of uranium that has lain dormant underground for billions of years, shrouded beneath the esker landscape.

Behind the works are the ideas of geologist Marcia Bjornerud, who suggests that by approaching the passage of time with acceptance rather than denial, we might cultivate a more respectful relationship with our home planet and its diverse forms of life. Places and environments where temporality can be especially sensed evoke a feeling of belonging. A distanced temporal perspective, along with the present traces of immemorial time, can, at best, guide us back to presence and a sense of meaning.

Kristiina Mäenpää (b. 1990, Tampere) works with mixed media, focusing on photographic techniques, sculpture, and installation. Her work recurrently explores themes of impermanence and trace, as well as the dialogue between artwork and space. Mäenpää received her MFA in Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki in 2023, and MA in Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in 2024.

The exhibition and the artist’s work have been supported by the Oskar Öflund Foundation, the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike), and the Kone Foundation. Thanks are also due to the assistants for their help in the realisation of the works.