Laura Horelli

Laura Horelli’s recent video artworks are compelling examinations of a private past and the reconstruction of memory.

The starting point of Horelli’s single channel video Bit to Bite (2009) is an image of a woman talking to a puppet dog in a kitchen setting at a television studio. The woman is Horelli’s now late mother, who hosted an educative children’s show on nutrition in 1980’s Finnish television. Through the film winding around the concepts of private and public, Horelli seeks to stir up memories of her mother, who died when she was only ten. In the voice-over, Horelli discusses the memories and emotions evoked by seeing the staged scenes, crafting an absorbing study on the workings of memory and constructing a narrative for a personal history.

Horelli carried on working with themes related to the realms of family life and memory in her 2011 video work The Terrace. In this work, Horelli goes through her recollections of her childhood spent in Nairobi in 1970s and ‘80s. In the voiceover covering a combination of old photographs of the domestic life of Horelli's family, and newer footage from 2010 of the house and its exteriors, Horelli’s narrator position alternates between the one of herself as a child and her current, critical adult perspective. The constantly changing nature of both memory and identity become central themes to the work, alongside with the questions of subjectivity and the relationship between the public and private spheres.

Horelli participates in the 6-month-long residency program, sponsored by Alfred Kordelin Foundation, at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn.