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Despite his young age, Jari Silomäki (born 1975) has a résumé a mile long.
His fascinating series works "Exercises for Adulthood" and "Weather
Journal" (an ongoing project) are greatly appreciated by the art public,
curators and critics, having been shown so far in seventeen countries and
sold in large numbers all over the world. Silomäki represented Finland at
the Sydney Biennial and he has been awarded the Fotofinlandia prize.
In his latest series, "My Unopened Letters", Silomäki creates a kind of
fictive reality: the tales of a fictive self and network concerning the
self's relationships with other people in the past, present and future.
Over the years, he has received letters from different people, which he has
left unopened. The letters thus contain countless attempts to contact him,
messages from those who wrote them and conceptions of relations between the
self of the narrative and the writers. They have all remained clouded in
secrecy. The unopened letters are arranged in piles on shelves according to
their senders, forming a balanced installation of chromatic beauty, which
Silomäki has photographed and printed in large format. This installation is
the core of the series. The other small groups of works belonging to the
series consist of images depicting situations in the relationships between
the writers of the letters and self of the story. They are complemented
with text panels commenting on the situations in the images. Jari Silomäki
plays with the concepts of document and fiction and their mutual
relationship, and the characters of his tales deal with problems and
emotions that are true and characteristic of man. In terms of colour, the
works are linked through green: the images employ different tones of green
lending a kind of distanced, cinematic mood to them.
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