8.–31.5.2026

Sofia Okkonen’s exhibition Thoughts, Feelings, Behaviour, consisting of staged photographs, presents an anonymous, fully painted nude female figure. Isolated within a photographic studio, the woman is positioned against simple, saturated fields of colour as well as technical surfaces and equipment. The body appears heavy, often reclined and passive. When active, the figure’s actions are directed towards herself, performed for her own sake, or focused on posing.

In the exhibition at Photographic Gallery Hippolyte, decorative buttercream cakes, frames, a quad bike, knives, snakes, a drone and a massage chair also play their own roles. Through these elements, Okkonen explores the interrelations between desire, superficiality, aggression and melancholy.

Aesthetically, Okkonen draws on the expertise gained through her work and in directing models within fashion photography. At the same time, she blurs the boundary between photography and painting by further processing her photographs on paper. Okkonen explores how different types of paper, the scanning process, and the effects of spontaneous stains and creases alter the nature and interpretation of the photograph—like painting with a dirty brush.

The works in the exhibition are based on an interest in capturing a figure trapped within itself, yet blind to its own shadows, and the dim atmosphere it produces. The exhibition is underpinned by reflections on the alternation between superficial self-sufficiency and self-loathing vulnerability. The friction and close oscillation between these two opposing forces appear as a way of being in the world, as physical sensations and as a condition: lovelessness arising from a hunger for love.

Sofia Okkonen (b. 1987) is a Helsinki-based visual artist working with staged photography. She graduated with a Master of Arts degree in 2017 from the Photography Department of the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at Aalto University. Okkonen’s artistic themes stem from tensions and contradictions within her inner world, which are often connected to broader social phenomena. Her works address, among other things, the time-bound nature of romantic love, fertility and pressures around reproduction, manifestations of narcissistic libido, and the performance of the feminine.

Okkonen’s work has been exhibited in Helsinki at Sinne Gallery, Kunsthalle Helsinki and the Finnish Museum of Photography, as well as at the Turku Art Museum, Espoo Cultural Centre, the Northern Photographic Centre in Oulu, Foto Tallinn, the Finnish Institute in Stockholm, in Vienna (Vienna Design Week, Austria), in Zagreb (Organ Vida Festival, Croatia), and in Hyères (finalist in the International Festival of Fashion, Photography and Accessories competition, France).

 The exhibition and the artist’s work have been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike), the Olga and Vilho Linnamo Foundation, and the Finnish Cultural Foundation.