The Exhibition

My exhibition is done! I have had my first ever international art exhibition and I managed to complete my residency! I didn't fail! There were moments when I was afraid I wouldn't finish the photos and something would happen and everything would fall apart but I did fine. I'm fine.


I built the exhibition mostly on Friday evening. I was procrastinating all day, most of the other artists were already done but I just didn't somehow want to get into it. Building an exhibition can be really exhausting; it's so banal compared to actually creating the work. In fact, I'm pretty convinced most artists hate building the actual exhibition. I was somehow insecure with my work and didn't really know where I was going with the whole exhibition so I was just putting it off. In the end I did it anyway and at the last moment I had the wonderful idea to sow some of my photos into these wooden frames so I sat at the studio, in the dark, sewing photos. It was an interesting idea, though, and something I might work on more later. The idea isn't completely finished yet but I think there's something to it.


I put up quite many photos, at first I felt I'd just stick with the six big prints I made but then again, it felt like only a half of the story. The six pictures I chose as my main attraction all have this kind of wide, cinematic quality and while I do like that in photos, I miss a kind of intimacy and spontaneity in them. I still can't marry wide, staged photos with spontaneous shots, so they ended up being separate parts of the exhibition. I did put up spontaneous, close-ups too in the end. I felt I wanted to show my range, just go all in because this is a big deal for me.


Studio Kura has three different spaces for exhibitions: a gallery near the office that used to a rice silo, the gallery next to our residency house and then also a gallery space in the residency house number two. All of these houses are just a few minutes walk from each other and people coming to see our art could come and do a kind of a tour through all of them. I shared the gallery with my housemate Preema. We fit nicely into the space and it has a quite a lot of light, despite the dark evenings we have here at this time of the year. The humidity and heat is not that good for the photos, though, I had a lot of trouble trying to keep them on the wall. Most photos were stacked with Blutack and tape and they still kept toppling down the minute I turned my back to them. I really hate these weird cheap prints sometimes.

And here is the layout of my exhibition:






On Saturday morning we opened the doors at 11, though we wouldn't have the actual opening party until 15:30. It feels so surreal to be writing about this, for so many months I've been going through the timetable, seeing other photos of other opening parties and imagining what it would be like to actually be there myself. And now I was! I took a lot of photos from the opening party, but that'll be for the next post, this one is dragging on for long enough already.

The opening day of the exhibition and the day before that were quite confusing to me. I was insecure and undecided about my work and as always, I felt a bit exposed knowing people would come and look at my work. I love the photography part and I love finishing a photo and polishing it up but the parts after that, the printing, the planning, the exhibition, it just feels somehow very anti-climatic. I can't really explain how and I'm sure that's just part of the process but I guess when the pictures are printed, they lose their ethereal quality for me. Then they're just there, on the paper and that's it. When they're in digital form, I can build anything and everything around them but when they're in paper, they're kind of trapped in the real world.

Well, it was a rough day, plus very hot and humid. I went around the other exhibition spaces on Saturday morning and saw doggies again! For a while I just thought about pretty doggies and didn't stress about anything else.





The shiba inu had a tennis ball with Wilson written on it! I know Wilson is a brand name for balls but it just made me think of Cast Away the movie, and it was really funny to me. This dog is so lovely! He's also superpolite, he never, ever barks!