2018
Artist Rita Jokiranta confronts the effects of climate change
Since 2005 moving images have been Rita Jokiranta’s main media, before that she mostly worked with photography. But she also occasionally works with light and sound. Multi-channel video installations in large scale are a preferable form of presentation, with color filters, photographs and soundscapes added to the videos.
Conceptually her catalogue of work ranges from deeply personal visual diaries that often deal with questions of time and memory to well-researched cinematic essays that address the urgent subjects of our times, such as migration (Here, and Beyond, 2011 and Horizons, 2013). In the former, she often works in an elliptical and unorthodox fashion, collecting material in the manner of a journal, where images like pieces of a puzzle are assembled on the editing table (Life as It Flees, 2017). For the latter, Jokiranta spends months investigating the topic at hand. Both type of methodology result in poetic and ephemeral time based works that impact the viewer not only intellectually but physically as well:
”My works do not have a linear narrative. I don’t believe in telling a story with one image. Usually, the events in real life are paralleled, coincidental and layered, maybe without any connection to each other. I use the multi-channel technique to create dynamics between image, event and interpretation. Yet a multi-channel work may include parts, which also can be shown as an independent one-channel piece. The spatial experience absolutely plays a big role and that’s why the projections must be large scale, so that viewers can feel them with their bodies and become part of the work.”, Jokiranta muses.
The project Jokiranta will be working on in New York City during her residency will confront the effects of global climate change and how major cities such as New York are affected by those phenomena. This subject has long been an interest of hers and she has toiled over the idea at length how to bridge two subjects together – art and science!
And should you find yourself in Helsinki in October, her latest multi-channel video installation In the Minds of Others will open at Gallery Huuto on October 25th, just a few weeks after her NYC residency ends.