Santeri Tuori: Waterfall

Between Portraiture, Photography and the Moving Image

Tuori’s interest in the interaction between wielders of power and those who are the objects of the use of power during his days as a student of law may have influenced the way he later began to order things as an artist. The material for his first works was shot as follows: he asked individual models to spend an hour in a room where, apart from the sparse furnishings, there was only a narrow-gauge film camera focused on the model. The camera in turn was linked by cable release to Tuori, who was in an adjacent room. Thus, when he was taking one shot every other second for the following hour, he did so without seeing the model. The end result for each model was some two thousand narrow-gauge film frames, selecting from which Tuori later made two different series of works – one animated, the other not. The animated work, the video installation Posing Time (2001), took on its final form when he transferred the narrow-gauge film frames to DVD videos, which are shown in the exhibition space as an apparently immaterial projection on Plexiglas hanging from the ceiling. Tuori made the unanimated series of works – the one based on still-shots – by making dozens of still prints of each model, which he then arranged as a sequence inside a large frame.

Tuori’s works can, of course, be seen as symbolic and critical representations of modern surveillance and control, in which the ‘bad’ (the institution, the system) uses power in relation to the innocent or ‘good’ (the individual). But, on closer consideration, the issue is not that simple: here, the symbolic wielder of power (Tuori) does not control the nascent portrait, except in part and quite haphazardly. But neither does the model have complete control. The question of how portrait identity is constructed is thus convoluted into a complex tangle, in which ‘power’ appears to be situated somewhere between photographer, photographed and camera.

Tuori’s next series of works, his "projection works" (2001-2002), is based on the same overlap between the photographs and moving images of a person. When photographing the material for the works, he in turn photographed and videoed individual models, his main aim being to get as big a correspondence as possible between the still shots and moving images in terms of size, composition and lighting. When videoing, he did not, however, immobilise his models, but let them move naturally in front of the camera. And in addition he photographed using black-and-white film, whereas the videoing was in colour. In the projection works, black-and-white photographs are placed in openings in the walls, and video loops are projected onto the photographs by projectors on the other side of the walls. The end result is affecting, outright magical, and even disturbing; ever-new variations on the photographed individuals are as though always in motion behind, on top of and around the black-and-white portrait. The models’ physiognomic features, with which we thought we were already familiar, change as though on the sly into completely different ones, and even into the opposite of what was seen previously. The projection works is an exceptional artwork in the sense that it can be experienced simultaneously both as conceptual and as theoretical – as pondering the formation of the meaning of the image – and as a sublime, momentarily even repellent presentation of the enigmatic nature of human existence.

Tuori’s third set of works, the video 35 Minute Smile (2002), is small in scale and tragicomic. A man, the artist himself, smiles without a break for 35 minutes. The viewer initially experiences the situation as funny, then as irritating, and ultimately as painful.

Jan Kaila