Everyday Strangeness

Herttoniemenranta, april 2020 / Photo: Yehia Eweis/Helsinki City Museum

The strangeness of everyday life is revealed and the line between fact and fiction is blurred when spaces and the people in them are examined from a different perspective or focusing on the smallest details. The Everyday Strangeness online exhibition opens the collection activities of HAM Helsinki Art Museum and Helsinki City Museum to the public through a common theme. The exhibition features the video art compilation Observe the moment from HAM’s collection and photographs documenting Helsinki during the coronavirus outbreak from the City Museum’s collections, collectively titled Silent City. Employing a similar tone, the video pieces and photographs challenge viewers to look beyond routines.

Observe the moment

Iiu Susiraja: Red cheeks, 2017 / Photo: Iiu Susiraja

HAM’s media art collection includes approximately two hundred works, of which nine were selected to feature in this exhibition. The featured video pieces subtly test the boundaries of reality, highlighting details that are usually ignored or depicting the activities of those we live with in an incongruous and comical way.

Johanna Ketola’s three-channel installation offers views of the city’s outdoor and indoor spaces where a stationary camera has recorded possible, but in some way strange everyday occurrences. Anssi Pulkkinen’s seemingly still indoor image depicts a surprising transformation. Anneli Nygren replicates Japanese artist Yoko Ono’s (born 1933) performance piece from 1963. In the video, a woman entertains her guests by showing off the contents of her laundry basket. Iiu Susiraja’s three videos are portraits in which the artist’s stare entrances the viewer in the middle of situations that challenge the norms of being. Pasi Autio utilises the combined effect of image and sound to underline the subtle details of street views. In Olli Keränen’s piece, an everyday trip to the grocery shop expands to become a choreography of gestures and movement. Pilvi Takala sits the viewer behind a hidden camera to watch what happens inside public transport vehicles. Genuine reactions mix with character performances, making a suspicious situation seem believable.

00:18 Johanna Ketola: There Is No Snake in Our Forest (part 2); 12:07 Anssi Pulkkinen: Nothing Ever Happens; 15:22 Anneli Nygren: Laundry Piece; 18:45 Iiu Susiraja: Red cheeks; 20:45 Iiu Susiraja: Mirror; 22:45 Iiu Susiraja: Vitrine; 24:05 Johanna Ketola: There Is No Snake in Our Forest (part 2); 31:04 Pasi Autio: Crossroads; 34:52 Olli Keränen: Sac; 43:37 Pilvi Takala: Easy Rider; 48:20 Johanna Ketola: There Is No Snake in Our Forest (part 2)

Silent City

Helsinki City Museum has been recording the lives of the residents of Helsinki and contemporary phenomena for over a hundred years. City Museum photographer and winner of the 2016 Fotofinlandia award Yehia Eweis started documenting the ways in which the state of emergency caused by the coronavirus is reflected in the cityscape in March 2020. At first, his photographs depicted the city devoid of people and the phenomena that arose as a result of quarantine measures, such as the rise in outdoor activities and staying home. However, his range of subject matter has since become broader: distance learning and the end thereof, teddy bears in windows and other visual messages, safe distances, the city orchestra’s streaming activities, public transport, the closing of libraries, health care, mask use, the easing and re-tightening of restrictions. The coronavirus pandemic will ultimately be recorded in hundreds of photographs that will become part of Helsinki City Museum’s collections, many of which are featured in this exhibition.