My new works are a continuation of themes that I have treated previously. Icons and pornographic, advertising and fashion imagery are mixed and quotidianized in them.

The Double series presents siblings, identical twins. While addressing the concept of the mirror image, the reflection, they also take up the issue of the nature of the photograph. A person cannot see him or herself completely, as a whole physical being; in the reflection we see only parts of ourselves, while the photograph records a moment in life speeding past as a two-dimensional picture. In the fragility and strangeness of the reflection, the image either fascinates or leads us to the brink of horror. While a photograph or a reflection in a mirror reinforces our experience of existence, it also reminds us of death, the transience of all things. The photograph is time past which will not return and which no longer exists

The works of the Stage series present the two-dimensional surface of the photograph as a space where the performance is carried out for the viewer. A stage is a platform, a scene where acting takes place and art is presented to society. These works explore the interfaces of the private and the communal, and the intimate and the public. The photographs of this series are intimate studies of fumbling words and wordless whispers.

Heli Rekula

On the Touch of the Gaze

In the present photographs, mostly from 2006, Rekula has succeeded in crystallizing questions that have guided her work for many years. The new pictures no longer contain the extreme representations of women's sexual manipulation that characterized the artist's earlier themes of human subjects. There is now a transition from the presentation of personages to the visual interpretation of gesture, gaze and touch. Landscapes have also been eliminated from the present showing; there are no connections whatsoever with compositions from the tradition of landscape art and the recycling of themes. On show now are dramatically simplified views of black earth with no middle ground and a light-coloured, non-spatial sky.

Rekula's paintings present questions not only of the boundaries of the body, self and the world but also of the borderlands of corporeal existence, representation and display. The images present in a repeated manner not only the actual displaying but also possibility of externalness retreating into the internal and opening up on the uncontrolled. All this can be crystallized as the conflict between intact self and its endless duplication, or erosion of a kind.

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The question posed by Ilona Anhava regarding Rekula's art - when is a person objectified so much as to be no longer a person - is called for. In Stage Rekula approaches the theme through the movements of the body and their spatial display.

Stage is a series of images, like a recording of a performance that has taken place in an empty padded room. In these pictures we see a naked woman in different positions. The spatial solution in Stage points to the tradition of displaying art in which the space for doing so defines the manifestation, experiencing and boundaries of the work. On the other hand, the gestures of the female body shut in the padded room point to a personal ordeal in which the body is forced into its poses. But how has this woman come to be in the room? And who has put her in this space of playing at display, providing a suitable shield for treating matters of even an oppressive nature.

The situation in the images and the woman's poses suggest obsessive behaviour beyond personal will - the fact that someone giving orders, either within the person herself or from outside, has forced her on her knees, to bow, against the wall… The female body in Stage is steered by orders from outside, like a puppet that does not move of its own accord but whose position is defined by the instructions of the puppeteer.

In Stage the external definer of poses is left open. Is this about putting a woman in a pose, of objectifying the woman, or the woman presenting herself as an object, like an animated doll, without any will of her own?

In Surplus and The Double the question of the animator applies more directly to the subject's relationship with the self; the possibility of an animator outside the image seems to have been removed.

The Double is a series of double portraits of sisters. The persons in the image touch and encounter but also look past one another. Here, Rekula moves past the theme of the mirror image, and as in the Surplus series, she approaches the relationship of the self with the ego through the perspectives of introversion, duplication and disintegration. In the pictures of the Surplus series, the subject is humbled, the eyes are closed and the skin is coated with white Vaseline. The figure in the image overflows her boundaries, but precisely because of the abundance, inexhaustibleness and excess of the body, its openness, the human being is part of the world, part of the landscape.

Rekula's portraits and landscapes are threatened by the same element of disintegration and unattainability. When the body melts into the black earth, the role of the skin, its surface, as a membrane shielding against the world is dissolved, thinned - as with my gaze before the image and that of the photographer lying in that landscape.

Rekula's three landscapes are focused at a distance, beyond the gaze, over volcanic rock, dried earth and an immense pile of tyres. The repeated proximity of the foreground disperses the gaze by drying it up and almost blinding it. What remains in view is the speechlessness of black earth, its material muteness.

Raising the gaze from the dark foreground, the same image shows a wide-open sky, which also presents hardly anything, only an even, blinding whiteness. There are only two alternatives: tangible, close and entering me through my skin, or unattainably distant and at the same time uncontrolled. The images present the retreating nature of the gaze and its desire to see far, into infinity.

In Rekula's new works remoteness resides within the corporeal person, and internalness correspondingly in remoteness. At the boundary of the body, even if only on the surface of a photograph, the two infinites intersect to become part of one another.