CANDIDATE 2003

Pertti Kekarainen

Born 1965 Oulu, lives in Helsinki

Pertti Kekarainen, who is studying for a doctor’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, has made series of photographs, video installations and pieces for public spaces. His output involves both analytically oriented ‘spade work’ and inventing things that are new and surprising in terms of colour and light, space and time, and two and three-dimensionality. His best-known series of photographs, Density from 1997-2002, is a subtle dialogue between different types of image. The primary element in Density is images of interiors made pale by distance and colourful, floating amoeba-like fragments. The series also includes portraits that investigate the relationship between a figure and the surrounding space, and self-referential monochromatic pictures.

Kekarainen’s most important video installation, paikka 1 (site 1) shown at Kiasma in 1999, is an innovative integrated work, in which moving projectors cast onto the walls images of, for instance, members of the public who have previously visited the space. In 2002, Kekarainen’s hitherto most complex work was completed, for the new building at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm: the funnel-like steel sculptures mirror the space in real time, while the adjacent photographs show its interiors with a time delay.

Jan Kaila