Heli Rekula
In Hemingway's Garden

09.08. - 01.09.2013

Helsinki Contemporary opens its autumn season with a solo show by photographic and video artist Heli Rekula.

In Hemingway’s Garden consists of photographs, vintage press photos and other archive material. The starting point of the new works is a single place and landscape, the garden in the Hemingway Home Museum in Key West, Florida.

Heli Rekula has previously exhibited photographs of landscapes and places, allowing the photographic records, or landscape memos, to tell their own stories. According to Rekula, the works were born of places life had taken her, of landscapes in which she was just a trespasser. The approach in this exhibition is different. Heli Rekula first visited the Hemingway Home Museum as a tourist. The place, the stories associated with it and the memories they evoked in her made Rekula return to the garden again and again.

Rekula posits Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), one of the icons of American literature, as the reference point for works through which she explores absence, the longing to be elsewhere, and the recognition of failure. Setting photographic art alongside documentary and historical material, the exhibition as a whole is also an investigation of the functions ascribed to photography.

When Rekula was preparing the exhibition, the aesthetic of error emerged as a conceptual mainstay of the show. For Rekula, a photograph is a record of a real event. Consequently, a technical error represents a distillation of the imperfection of humanity and the world, of the incompleteness of life. Rather than a landscape, a picture is a reflection of a landscape.

Heli Rekula (b. 1963) is an visual artist of international acclaim who works with photography and the moving image. Since 2009, she has worked as Professor of Photography at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway. The exhibition In Hemingway’s Garden will later in the autumn be seen in Norway at Kabuso Art Centre and in the beginning of next year at Oslo Fine Art Society.