Saara Ekström

Running in three parallel images in black & white and colour, and complemented with an evocative soundtrack, Biblion opens the dense and layered heart of the book. Fluid shapes of marbled covers, varied fibres of paper, dissolving appearances in printing ink are only some of the elements in a surreal world of enchanting visual narrative.

Time inevitably moves from past to future, passing the present moment. Mankind encloses to time its marks, stains and ruins. On the verge of vast changes time acts abnormally. It leaks, folds and fractures, allowing things belonging elsewhere, to the otherworldly, to
permeate itself. In the 8mm film the Helsinki Olympic Stadium represents a historical paradigm shift. Completed in 1938 the building outlines pure functionalist architecture and stands as a landmark for optimistic utopia and the oblivion on man’s neglect of history.

The graffiti on the grey concrete walls of the disused prison in Turku are like cave paintings from a lost civilisation in the Finnish artist Saara Ekström’s ‘Shadow Codex’, which, with a simple but overwhelmingly suggestive approach, lets text, drawings and the shabby pinup posters speak their own language about incarceration and institutionalised punishment. Each cell is a gallery, an indexical imprint of the anonymous inmates’ minds, from a past conjured forth by the film’s timeless black and white 16mm images, with a gloomy melancholy that borders on madness. But, at the same time, the surveillance machinery, the architecture and the many layers of engravings tell us about a society which, in its attempt to maintain law and order, creates monuments of its own shadow – set against John Cage’s ‘Perilous Night’.

In Saara Ekström's video Hypnos, Japanese Noh theatre masks become portals to a spiritual, ritual and psychological state, in dialogue with the forest. Fundamental, existential questions are contained here. Saara Ekström thematically returns to the unconscious both as a mental category and a layer in the fabric of collective history and deep time.