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Suspension in Other Terms (2025)
Suspension in Other Terms was a site-specific photography exhibition situated in a glass-walled room of a refugee reception center in Halikko (Salo, FI), where it remained on view for six weeks for the center’s ~200 residents. The site itself, a former mental health hospital with little renovation, carries forward its history of institutionalisation in its architecture and spatial hierarchies. Residents, unable to choose their placement, live in overcrowded rooms with minimal privacy and remain under constant CCTV surveillance in corridors, while being officially termed as Migri’s customers—a paradoxical shard of bureaucratic language that obscures the profound deprivation of agency characterizing their situation. The building does not reflect those who inhabit it but inducts them into the locally culturally constructed category of the “refugee,” encoded in its material and spatial logic.
The project emerged through my invitation by the Finnish cultural organization Ko-Koo-Mo to co-create socially engaged encounters at the site in early 2025. Visiting the site almost daily for 1,5 months, I listened to residents’ concerns while documenting the political dimensions of the reception center’s spatial arrangements with my film camera, ultimately producing more than 400 photographs. The exhibition was conceived as a re-presentation of the immediate material conditions of the site, re-visibilizing the naturalized agents of state control embedded within it, while acknowledging my own surveilling gaze—here reversed, turned back at the institution rather than its residents. Through patterned presentation of positives and negatives, alongside visible de- and re-constructions of photographic prints, the work reflects on suspension as a generalized refugee condition: bureaucratic, spatial, and temporal waiting; repeated confrontations with death; and enforced reconfigurations of self. Installed in a frequently used corridor of the reception center, the exhibition’s tone and artistic language were shaped by its proximity to the resident’s daily life.
The Home Will Come Again (2022-2023)
Between 2022 and 2023, I kept a photographic diary through a sequence of relocations, of which at the time there were nearly two dozen. It felt like being caught in a rip current—a narrow flow moving away from the shore, cutting through breaking waves. My shore was Ukraine. Upon leaving it, I was carried into the open sea, powerless to control speed or direction. Places and objects around me became blurred; they were not themselves but, rather, ideas of themselves, symbols. I returned to photography with the intention of grounding myself in the world: this is a table, this is a plate on the table, this is breakfast on the plate on the table. But the camera too betrayed me, amplifying disorientation instead of resisting it.
While shaping these images into an exhibition series, it became even more evident to me that what they visibilize is not the movement per se. Rather, to me, they portray the distortion of spatial and perceptual registers of the environment amid the rip of displacement.