My practice is guided by a post-modernist interest in exploring and questioning the role of photography in society. My work is mainly conceptual, and strongly focused and founded on using images as a tool to explore, analyze, develop and illustrate the structured framework of thought. The on-going Vieraalla maalla (In a Foreign Place) project is induced by experiences of cultural misunderstandings that affect the way we perceive images and the surrounding world. In this fabricated outlandish world traditional Finnish customs and practices have been given a slightly odd twist. Not deviating beyond recognisability for recipients with the relevant cultural knowledge, the scenes toy with proverbs and obsolete customs, rendering the images absurdly strange to a viewer unfamiliar with the cultural heritage. Drawing from personal experiences of cultural alienation and misunderstandings, and my Carelian origin, the work invites the recipients to strive to decipher and locate the depicted world, thereby denoting the arbitrary nature of our interpretations so easily taken for granted.
