9.1.—1.2.2026, Photographic Gallery Hippolyte

In 2026, it will be two hundred years since the world’s first surviving photograph was recorded from the window of a farmhouse on the outskirts of Chalon-sur-Saône. The photograph, taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, ties the photograph and the window together. The window not only frames the view but also functions as a passage between perception and the image.

Stepping into the exhibition, the viewer encounters a photograph taken in the present day that shows Niépce’s house from the outside. While Niépce’s photograph looks outward from the house, the photograph of the house and its window turns the gaze back to the starting point: the attic. Within the exhibition, the viewer is presented with a kind of stage set in which shadows, rather than light, become the material of the image, and where the boundaries between image and imagination, and between perception and language, are in motion.

Consisting of four photographs, View (Sunset) reveals the shadows cast on a wall by windows. The images are made at sunset, when light arriving at a shallow angle highlights the forms of open window frames. The works Space Divider I & II take their shape and scale from actual doors. They consist of freestanding hinged aluminium frames, each holding four photographs that depict the movement of shadows cast by doors opening into a dark room and a light room. This contrast between light and dark space refers to photography’s foundational forms, the camera lucida and the camera obscura, and to their literal meanings, the light room and the dark room. This conceptual setup opens a path toward the question that preoccupies the artists: what are images, and how do they change the way we look at the world?

The film projection Reader, Light makes visible an event that would otherwise remain hidden from perception. The seemingly empty space is filled with shimmering air currents, which are revealed only when light draws their shadow onto paper. The shadow shifts attention away from concrete objects – the book and the candle – towards the abstract notions of memory and the search for understanding.

In the exhibition, the photograph does not depict things directly; instead, it refers to them through their absence. Shadows register disturbances in the passage of light and show how perception, too, is built from indirect traces. This idea is condensed in the diptych Pages 110 & 111, where the two words “näkymä (view)” and “näky” (vision, apparition) are placed opposite each other. The first points to something external and observable, while the latter brings into play something internal, indirect or even hallucinatory. It is precisely in this indirect referentiality that shadows and words resemble one another: both are traces of something that is absent.

Across the exhibition, it is this invisible, backgrounded, and discontinuous element that is given weight. What happens when the object is no longer primary, and meaning begins to emerge from what we do not look at directly?

Tanja Koljonen (b. 1981) lives and works in Helsinki. She works within the expanded field of printmaking and photography, creating paper-based works as well as artist’s books and publications that unfold into exhibitions. Central to Koljonen’s practice is the relationship between written language and image, and how mixing these elements questions habitual directions and modes of reading and seeing. Koljonen has held solo and group exhibitions in Finland and Europe, and has participated in international residencies (Leipzig International Artist Program, Leipzig 2018; Kempinski Young Artist Program, Shanghai & Beijing 2015; International Studio Program Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 2014).

Juuso Noronkoski (b. 1983) is a visual artist based in Helsinki. He graduated from the MA programme in Photography at Aalto University in 2015. His practice combines photography, video, sound, sculpture, and writing. At the core of his work is the construction of meaning in images, and the ways in which visual experience is shaped by space, time, and material presence. Noronkoski’s works have been exhibited internationally, and he has held solo exhibitions in Finland, Germany, and Japan. In 2024, he was awarded the Finnish State Prize for Photographic Art.