Perttu Saksa
A Kind of You

04. - 27.10.2013

Perttu Saksa’s exhibition is a vision of humanity; of our ways of mastering and subordinating nature to make it like ourselves. A Kind of You is a series of documentary portraits that look ceaselessly back at us and will not leave us in peace.

Saksa’s latest photographic works are based on an old Indonesian custom, in which street performers teach their pet monkeys tricks and dress them in traditional masks. These ‘dancing monkeys’ have since turned into a cruel and macabre urban street theatre. Saksa has travelled in Indonesia seeking out and documenting in his portraits city monkey figures, who say more about humanity than about the nature of the animal, and are like the dangerous, nasty, reverse side of what we are accustomed to expect from animal photography.

The encounters photographed in streets and parks are juxtaposed with sombre-toned portraits of monkeys shot in an empty studio space. Through this juxtaposition there emerges a classical beauty, but with truly vile underpinnings. Saksa alludes to the different roles of the portrait and, via both the object and the shooting situation, takes the viewer into an intermediate space formed by documentary and action. He asks, how and why we look at an animal – and do we meet the same gaze when we look at each other? The answer is revealed via this series of photographs, in the ingenious and diabolical means used to harness the animal to the service of humankind.

Via the relationship between nature and culture Saksa explores the human capacity for empathy and the ways we confront otherness:

“Underlying all this is an uncertainty about and awareness of our place in the world, which allows us to call into question and reflect on our relationship with the surrounding space. In the pictures this is linked with contradictions, which could probably be called the shadows of humanity. The shadows take us to places that are incomplete, and filled with contradictions. With places that are simultaneously grotesque and beautiful, that seem familiar and yet are anonymous. This is the situation that I have aimed at. It makes the images and the interpretation of them fragile, but at the same time gives the pictures a depth that makes them human.”
- Perttu Saksa

The photographer and visual artist Perttu Saksa (b. 1977) graduated with a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, and is currently pursuing his doctoral studies at Aalto University. Saksa’s works have been shown in numerous solo and invited exhibitions, including: the Stadtgalerie Kiel; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; the Felleshus, Berlin; and the Finnish Museum of Photography. His works have been acquired for public collections in Finland and abroad.