Family Album

Family Album is an ongoing photo collage project that explores the complexities of family history and heritage. By deconstructing and reconstructing images from my personal archives, I build new narratives and create an alternative family album.

Family Album

This is my psychic theatre.

I am the director, the scenographer

and the actor in this play.

Family Album is an ongoing photo collage project that explores the complexities of family history and heritage. By deconstructing and reconstructing images from my family and personal archives, I build new narratives and create an alternative family album, my version of history.

The work is like a stage where I play with different roles and role models produced both by the immediate family and our culture and society at large. Parents and grandparents, fairy tale characters, cultural icons and other historical figures show up in the images – opening up different perspectives on history, identity and sexuality.

My artistic practise is based on photographs which I manipulate by using different digital and physical tools and collage techniques. Leaning on snapshot and post-photography, expressionism and surrealism, pop art and punk, I create rough multilayered images. I contemplate different layers of reality, juxtaposing the real and surreal, the documentary and imaginary, the physical and psychical. Via intuitive and experimental working process my images become portrayals of – and portals to – my psychological reality.

Family Album is based on the family photographs taken by my Dad in the 1970’s and 1980’s. In the work I combine old family snapshots with photo booth and passport images, mobile phone images, childhood drawings and digital drawing, screen shots and text. I recycle same motifs, images and details in various combinations,  scales and contexts. I use repetition as a way to express the infinite formation and transformation of one’s identity and history.

All histories and archives are inherently unreliable and full of gaps. My family history is not in my family photographs. It is in my body – and yet, so much of it is invisible and unknown. Making images is my attempt to connect to this hidden past. I am a historian and an archaeologist in my own body, digging for fragments, hints and evidence. The work is my interpretation and subjective vision of how the past and the present are constantly intertwined, how one’s own history and identity always remain a mystery.

The evolution of sexual identity is a prominent part of the work. I use Marilyn Monroe as a symbol for sexual attraction, desire and constructed sexual identity. In a world where sex and sexuality are constantly commercialized, sexuality often looks like a play and a performance, a given image and a fantasy. By making images I build representations of sexuality that I can identify with.

Family Album (2018–) began as a series of zines, with 60–120 pages each. Seven zines have been published so far. The work has also been exhibited in several solo and group shows In Finland and internationally.