Award winner 2002

Heli Rekula

Heli Rekula was born in Helsinki in 1963, and still lives and works there, having graduated from the Lahti Institute of Design in 1991. Rekula works mainly with video and photography, often posed photographs.

The subject is often the female body and women's different roles, women both collectively and as individuals. Frequent themes include innocence and the loss of innocence, purity and impurity, and the boundaries between. Rekula views people as cultured animals. She questions the impact of culture on natural sexuality and aggression.

Rekula also uses pure landscapes as subjects, however. Her landscape photographs have an almost religious character, altars of an unknown faith. The landscapes may be natural, devoid of signs of human presence, or they may contain mounds of car tyres or foundered ships. Her landscape photographs expand on shape and matter.

Rekula has taken part in many group exhibitions abroad and her video works have been shown at numerous film festivals in Finland and elsewhere.