CANDIDATE 2010

Jorma Puranen

Jorma Puranen has for decades sustained an eloquent inquiry into the spatial politics and cultures of the Scandinavian North. Throughout a number of diverse but precisely realized projects, Puranen pursues readings of mythical, colonial, historical and modern space. Indeed Puranen’s seductive yet challenging imagery articulates the contested spaces of modernity and tradition, the possibilities of sustainable cultures, the landscape as storyteller of the past and agent of memory and loss. Crucially, Puranen consistently implicates himself in the act of image-making, underlining that there is no innocence in representation.

Jan-Erik Lundström