Vital Debris
2025
Solo exhibition
Porvoo Art Hall (FI)
2025
Solo exhibition
Porvoo Art Hall (FI)
Exhibition text
Taru Happonen paints like an archaeologist, examining satellite images, cells, motherboards, and skin surfaces from the perspective of another time. In the paintings, hardly anything human can be seen. She performs a dissection of an environment caught in a stage of slow collapse and mutation.
As one can read daily in the news, we are living in an age of planet-wide destruction. At the same time, however, new biological, geological, and synthetic species emerge: plastic-eating bacteria and new types of stone formed from the fossil industry waste. The living, the non-living, and the artificial blend into one another, this era merging with the one to come. The world changes regardless of human feelings, moving toward a time beyond human existence.
Sometimes change only becomes perceptible by shifting the scale of observation. This is the fundamental movement in the exhibition: zooming in and out of the human experience.
Hole- and eye-like forms recur in the works at different scales, as do circuit-like diagrams resembling circuit boards. Similar structures also repeat in nature across scales. Tree leaves contain “eyes” at the microscopic level, as do cells. Networks of neurons resemble the traces on a computer motherboard, and both resemble satellite images of airports and cities. These structures optimise the transmission of signals and energy efficiency. Nervous systems with their synapses, transistors with their logic gates, and cities with their street networks demonstrate how the regularities of physics scale across levels.
The works incorporate marble, stone, and aluminium powder, along with glue, paper, and wood. In the choice of materials, a similar kind of interweaving takes place as in the scales and temporal dimensions depicted in the works. Their colours and materials adapt to the concrete and aluminium of Porvoo Art Hall, just as a living species always adapts to its prevailing environment. The exhibition explores the layers of deep geological time and movements on scales beyond human experience, and as a whole it is at once tender and unsettling.
Reaching towards the sculptural, the paintings evoke the way two-dimensional surfaces become three-dimensional forms by being wrapped or folded. When the surface of the beings is peeled away and unfolded, as happens in several of Happonen’s works, one returns to the two-dimensional plane.
The end of painting on canvas has long been declared, and art education today emphasises expanded forms of visual art. Happonen demonstrates that painting executed on a rectangular canvas still holds power. Even if the works appear non-human, they remind us why humankind has gazed at painted surfaces for thousands of years: because for a moment they can transport us from the midst of the visible to where we cannot see.
Text: Pontus Purokuru
Artwork photos: Angel Gil
Installation photos: Anna Niskanen
Taru Happonen paints like an archaeologist, examining satellite images, cells, motherboards, and skin surfaces from the perspective of another time. In the paintings, hardly anything human can be seen. She performs a dissection of an environment caught in a stage of slow collapse and mutation.
As one can read daily in the news, we are living in an age of planet-wide destruction. At the same time, however, new biological, geological, and synthetic species emerge: plastic-eating bacteria and new types of stone formed from the fossil industry waste. The living, the non-living, and the artificial blend into one another, this era merging with the one to come. The world changes regardless of human feelings, moving toward a time beyond human existence.
Sometimes change only becomes perceptible by shifting the scale of observation. This is the fundamental movement in the exhibition: zooming in and out of the human experience.
Hole- and eye-like forms recur in the works at different scales, as do circuit-like diagrams resembling circuit boards. Similar structures also repeat in nature across scales. Tree leaves contain “eyes” at the microscopic level, as do cells. Networks of neurons resemble the traces on a computer motherboard, and both resemble satellite images of airports and cities. These structures optimise the transmission of signals and energy efficiency. Nervous systems with their synapses, transistors with their logic gates, and cities with their street networks demonstrate how the regularities of physics scale across levels.
The works incorporate marble, stone, and aluminium powder, along with glue, paper, and wood. In the choice of materials, a similar kind of interweaving takes place as in the scales and temporal dimensions depicted in the works. Their colours and materials adapt to the concrete and aluminium of Porvoo Art Hall, just as a living species always adapts to its prevailing environment. The exhibition explores the layers of deep geological time and movements on scales beyond human experience, and as a whole it is at once tender and unsettling.
Reaching towards the sculptural, the paintings evoke the way two-dimensional surfaces become three-dimensional forms by being wrapped or folded. When the surface of the beings is peeled away and unfolded, as happens in several of Happonen’s works, one returns to the two-dimensional plane.
The end of painting on canvas has long been declared, and art education today emphasises expanded forms of visual art. Happonen demonstrates that painting executed on a rectangular canvas still holds power. Even if the works appear non-human, they remind us why humankind has gazed at painted surfaces for thousands of years: because for a moment they can transport us from the midst of the visible to where we cannot see.
Text: Pontus Purokuru
Artwork photos: Angel Gil
Installation photos: Anna Niskanen
Taxidermy Surfaces
2024
Solo exhibition
HAM Gallery
Helsinki Art Museum (FI)
2024
Solo exhibition
HAM Gallery
Helsinki Art Museum (FI)
Exhibition text
Time is the one thing that can’t be stopped. Like a sharp blade, it silently cuts through hard and soft, constantly advancing. Nothing is capable of jolting it even the slightest bit, but it changes everything.
(Excerpt from Liu Cixin’s novel The Dark Forest, translated by Joel Martinsen)
Visual artist Taru Happonen explores a complex, ever-changing world from both a cosmic and microscopic perspective in her exhibition Taxidermy Surfaces. Blending sci-fi and real-world elements, she combines the peeled skins of creatures with recurring motifs such as eye shapes, plant cells and circuitry.
The works featured in the exhibition employ a diverse array of materials such as pearlescent pigments, aluminium powder, oil paint, marble powder and mineral resin, mixing together materials traditionally associated either with painting or sculpture. Organic and synthetic elements are inextricably intertwined in both the material presence and content of Happonen’s art.
The soundscape of the exhibition was created in collaboration with composer Tapio Viitasaari.
Artwork photos: Angel Gil
Installation photos: HAM/Sonja Hyytiäinen
Time is the one thing that can’t be stopped. Like a sharp blade, it silently cuts through hard and soft, constantly advancing. Nothing is capable of jolting it even the slightest bit, but it changes everything.
(Excerpt from Liu Cixin’s novel The Dark Forest, translated by Joel Martinsen)
Visual artist Taru Happonen explores a complex, ever-changing world from both a cosmic and microscopic perspective in her exhibition Taxidermy Surfaces. Blending sci-fi and real-world elements, she combines the peeled skins of creatures with recurring motifs such as eye shapes, plant cells and circuitry.
The works featured in the exhibition employ a diverse array of materials such as pearlescent pigments, aluminium powder, oil paint, marble powder and mineral resin, mixing together materials traditionally associated either with painting or sculpture. Organic and synthetic elements are inextricably intertwined in both the material presence and content of Happonen’s art.
The soundscape of the exhibition was created in collaboration with composer Tapio Viitasaari.
Artwork photos: Angel Gil
Installation photos: HAM/Sonja Hyytiäinen