Anni Kinnunen│The Great Escape
The exhibition "The Great Escape" in the museum's exhibition space Skotið, deals with the interaction between man and nature. The surrealistically colourful photographs of the series The Great Escape combine nature, artificiality and fleeting moments.
The images don’t look real, but the situations in them are genuine and not created with a photo editor. The unreal atmosphere in the works reflects our time, where altered reality is true, and we don’t always know what to trust. In her works, Kinnunen plays with the expectation of truthfulness traditionally associated with photography, but as the artist says, the camera is just a recorder and even a bad such - the artist makes the picture.
The series of pictures moves in a natural environment, but nature remains in the background of plastic wigs, glitter and smoke. The works raise questions about our relationship with nature and the possibility of an ecological disaster. How far have we receded from nature, and what is naturalness? Where are we going, and how could we move on from here?
Although the artist appears in her images herself, they are not self-portraits. The characters in the images represent people in their her workinrole-plays, reflecting the atmosphere of our time and the moods of the artist. Kinnunen uses her body as part of the g method, in which the body and its memory become part of the works. The movement seen in the pictures is created through the movements of the artist’s body, adding the element of chance to the carefully prepared shooting situations.
When interested in a topic, Kinnunen begins her work by gathering information until she is ready to throw herself into the creative process. The Great Escape series was preceded by focusing on the function of the brain, on how we see things from our own perspective and are indifferent to big things that we experience distant.
During the past two decades, Kinnunen’s works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Germany, Japan, China, Russia, Denmark, Slovenia, Italy, Iceland, Luxembourg, Canada and the USA. In Finland, she has participated in events such as the Young Artists exhibition of Kunsthalle Helsinki (2009), the Snowball Effect Northern Finland Biennale (2012, 2014, 2016) and the Mänttä Art Festival (2013, 2018). Her works are included in the Oulu Museum of Art collections, the Finnish State Art Collection and the Finnish Institute in Japan, and more. In the last few years, Kinnunen has worked in artist residencies in Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Helsinki and several places in Italy.
