Catalogue > At random

The black-and-white 8mm film of the abandoned facilities of Turku County Prison (1835–2007), documents the layers of messages drawn, scratched and burned on the cell walls. The markings are passages to the shadow of an individual’s psyche, and expose an underbelly which a society simultaneously both generates and hides. The film becomes a codex of a collapsed civilization and evidence of a forbidden zone in the centre of the city. On top of the inmates’ messages, a second layer of graffiti by building squatters, trespassers and other participators has emerged, turning the walls into thickets of obscure visual information and indecipherable communication. The flow of images is punctuated by John Cage’s (1912–1992) composition “Perilous Night” (1964), described as a journey to the nocturnal side of the soul.

Saara Ekström works in film, photography, text and installation. Chronotopes where time and place densify, time that nurtures and erodes, the ambivalent desire to both remember and forget are at the core of her art. Ekström’s work has been shown extensively in various museums and festivals in Europe, the Americas and Asia. She received the Finnish media art prize AVEK-award in 2018 and the prizes of SW Finland in 2017, Finnish Art Society in 1995 and the Aboa prize in 1994. She has been the Helsinki Festival Artist in 2005 and was nominated for both Ars Fennica and Carnegie Art Award prizes in 2010.