"Spaß vorbei"

At the spring exhibition of Helsinki's Academy of Fine Arts in May 2001, the only individual work to lodge itself in my mind was Liisa Lounila's video "Popcorn". I knew nothing about its technique (an 18-metre long pinhole camera simultaneously taking hundreds of photographs from different directions), nor could I really define what was so fascinating about it: an absurd theme, a black and white image charming in its roughness, a strange feeling of non-linearity despite the actual duration of time...

I saw more works the next year, when Leevi Haapala, a researcher at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, chose Lounila to hold the Paulo Foundation's invited exhibition at the Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts. Haapala made his choice from among the work of 73 art students. Displayed at the showing were two videos and paintings of real and staged accidents. In the exhibition catalogue, Leevi Haapala described Lounila's works in the following terms:

"It seems as if Lounila wants to show in all manner of ways that the image is not just here. It is not an arrested state but rather in continuous movement... It has to be perceived as part of a plan, a matrix... There is a special nature to Lounila's way of registering the apparent neutrality of the image. Through threatening and titillating themes she draws our attention to the forms of visual representation and the meanings constructed in them beforehand. With her work, Lounila undermines and recodes meanings."

I am by no means the only one in whose mind Liisa Lounila's works have remained from first sight. Since 2002 she has participated some ten times in international exhibitions, at the Pontevedra, Venice and Istanbul biennials, among other showings, and there seems to no end in sight.