Jukka Korkeila
In Exile – I Look For the Life of the World to Come

10.01. - 02.02.2014

Jukka Korkeila’s exhibition at Helsinki Contemporary is a multi-part whole combining painting, installation and drawings. A common, unifying factor is the painting as an integrated spatial whole that creates movement, a zone of experience, between the viewer and the works. This is a coherent whole of which we can confidently, with pride even, say: It is more than the sum of its parts.

In Exile - I look for the life of the world to come consists of distinct spaces that use several different techniques and means of expression. Both the spaces and the chosen means serve the actualization of the painting, its fragile yet powerful sensibility. The whole thing is divided spatially into an installation that uses both concepts and posters, in a painting made directly onto the wall, and in a space constituted by and through paintings and drawings. The exhibition continues Jukka Korkeila’s artistic development, in both its themes and its use of space. In Exile - I look for the life of the world to come exists in and is bound up with a back-and-forth exchange with Korkeila’s I don't belong solely to myself exhibition held in the same space in autumn 2011.

The I don't belong solely to myself installation from autumn 2011 symbolized that immaterial moment when time began to run backwards, towards its beginning. This was the moment when the immaterial otherness symbolized by the installation baptized the newly opened exhibition space, in the same way as the infinite exists alongside the finite, the temporal alongside the timeless, and the immaterial alongside the material, both dimensions are present simultaneously.

“This was more a matter of juxtaposing embodied and disembodied elements, in which case, traditional paintings represented corporeal experience, while the installation represented incorporeal experience, and from this the idea of life and the idea of death arose and were juxtaposed. This new installation is like a prayer that wells up, quite literally, out of the first of these. It, too, takes a peek behind the veil that separates life and ‘death’.”

Korkeila’s way of envisioning and creating connections with this hard, treacherous, but inescapably human part and portion of reality is founded on a highly arduous, but carefully chosen act. He wants to open up the world and himself, to keep moving, not to become shut in, not to turn away.

This is a matter of memories and of experiences of renunciation, which are always extremely personal, yet communal, sharable. Individually Korkeila’s works and the exhibition as a whole tell us about these experiences very much in their own way, in their own context and on their own terms.

On a communal level Korkeila’s exhibition occupies the important, vigorous tradition whose main thinkers are the philosophers Paul Ricoeur and Hannah Arendt. Both of them emphasize the active, forward-looking and extroverted nature of memory and remembering.

For Ricoeur this is accentuated in sounding out and creating the past as a story, as an ability to tell ourselves about distance and closeness, about the continuum. Remembering is a promise of simultaneously holding on and letting go, it is a responsibility equally of tying ourselves down and of opening up. For Arendt it is summed up in two words: vita activa –being in motion, a life that enjoys movement, which does not submit, but is affected. It is participatory, it takes part. An activity that is possible only together, in company, not in isolation.

This is an act that wants and tries to forgive, both ourselves and others. Forgiveness in no way delivers us from evil, but it does prevent us from becoming prisoners of the past. It is an act that always and forever remembers, carries with it, and does not forget, ever. It is a philosophy of liberation that trusts in the power of forgiveness and in every way avoids emptiness and forgetting.

The sub-title of the exhibition has been borrowed and modified from the text of the liturgy of John Chrysostom (344-407AD)

Quotation from a conversation between Jukka Korkeila and Mika Hannula

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press 1999

Paul Ricoeur, Memory and Forgetting, Questioning Ethics, Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, Routledge 1999