CANDIDATE 2005

Salla Tykkä

born 1973 in Helsinki, lives in Helsinki

Salla Tykkä has used film, video and photography in her works. She investigates human sexual identity, becoming an adult and relationships with the surrounding world from a woman’s perspective. The works are at times brutal, even frightening. The people in them are fictive: a woman hates herself, her own body, her own life. The main character resists, wrestles with her own obsessions, she is a beast extending its claws, she is covered in thick fur.

The main character in the works is often a young woman who is seeking her self on the borders of the dreamlike. She suddenly finds it impossible to grasp what is happening around her, to her. Since no answers are to be found, the world crumbles to pieces.

In her short films Tykkä has used references to various film genres. She has allowed the films to affect the viewer’s consciousness in the background, to combine the previously seen with new material. Of course, this is also a matter of role playing. Woman is traditionally the object of the gaze, but in Tykkä’s works she can battle for power in a boxing ring, shed blood without concern, fighting the gender war physically, concretely.

Pirjo Hämäläinen & Salla Tykkä