Salla Tykkä was born in 1973 in Helsinki, Finland, where she lives and works today. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki 2003. She has been working with photography, video and film since 1996, and had her first solo show in 1997.
Her latest solo exhibitions include: Chapter Gallery, Cardiff, 2006; S.M.A.K., Gent, 2006; De Appel, Amsterdam; Museum Het Domein Sittard, 2006; Centre pour l'image contemporaine Saint-Gervais Genève, Genève, 2006; Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York, 2006 and Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, 2005.
Salla Tykkä's films have been shown at international film festivals including the 36th International Film Festival Rotterdam, Rotterdam, 2007; 21st Brest European Short Film Festival, Brest, 2006; Tribeca Film Festival, New York, 2003; International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Oberhausen, 2003 and 2002.
ARCTIC HYSTERIA. CONTEMPORARY ART FROM FINLAND
Applying cultural clichés as a catalyst, the exhibition focuses on stereotypes, which has given cultural meaning to the specificities of a given region, Finland. Literally speaking Finland does not belong to the Arctic in a geographic sense, but the Finns are – as are, say, the Russians, the French and the English – believed to have specific national characteristics. A cliché often repeated, when discussing Finnish people, is their supposedly close connection with nature.
In fact, the humanity-nature relationship emerges as a sort of connecting thread throughout Arctic Hysteria, bridging generations and boundaries of genre in Finnish contemporary art. The utopian optimism of the 1960s and 1970s concerning technological progress is confr...
Un regard à rebours des conventions sociales sur notre relation à l’Autre et sur la cellule familiale… faisant voler en éclat les apparences et révélant l’artificialité et les failles des relations entre individus… À travers des vidéos ou photos, les artistes tentent de mettre en évidence l’artificialité des normes qui régissent nos vies et les échanges sociaux.
Tensions, et frictions, l’individu se met en scène pour mieux « exhiber » les hypocrisies du moule lisse et consensuel !
Artistes : Emmanuelle Antille, Patty Chang, Patrick Faigenbaum, Douglas Gordon, Gina Pane, Agnès Varda … (installation, photo, film, … de la collection du Frac Lorraine) + Installati...
Finnish artist Salla Tykkä will show two film installations in the RHA in September - the Cave trilogy (2000 - 2003) comprising the works Lasso, Thriller and Cave and the Irish premiere of Zoo (2006). A series of photographs from the Blackwater series will accompany the installations.
Tykkä's trilogy Cave is centred on a female protagonist and, using 3 different actresses, loosely charts the transformation and growth of a woman as she journeys from childhood to adulthood. Concerns surrounding sexual identity and the problematic issues surrounding the female as object are prevalent in this work. Tykkä attempts to subvert this image of the female as passive object of the male gaze by creating a central female protagonist, in contrast with the classic films of the 1950's that tend towards the male as central to the na...