STANISLAVA OVCHINNIKOVA | SUSPENSION IN OTHER TERMS | 2025
Background & context:
Suspension in Other Terms was located in a glass-walled room of a refugee reception center¹ in Halikko (Salo, FI). For one and a half months, the exhibition was on view for the center’s ~200 residents, of whom, at the time, 70% were Ukrainian, and the rest Palestinian, Iranian, Kurdish, Somali, Argentinian, and more. Most of these people were likely to continue living in the center for periods ranging from 6 months to well over a year—waiting for the decision on their asylum application, or, in case of temporary protection², the year it takes for its recipients to acquire access to public healthcare and social welfare³.
The building of the reception center itself, which not long ago housed a mental health hospital, has undergone little to no renovation even after the change of the operator. Its history as a site of institutionalisation is visible through its architecture, with many of the original room divisions, distribution of showers and bathrooms, and other spatial hierarchies intact. It is a liminal—neither public, nor private—space: located on the outskirts of a very small city, it houses only those “assigned” to it by the authorities (prospective residents cannot choose which reception center they will move into), and insofar is removed from the public view. Inside, however, strangers live crammed in small rooms with little to no privacy even during the night, and when they exit these rooms to walk along the corridors towards the shared bathrooms and kitchens, they are surveilled through CCTV. At the same time, within the system, they are being officially referred to as customers—a paradoxical shard of bureaucratic language which obscures the profound deprivation of agency characterising the situation. The reception center does not reflect its inhabitants (it is hardly changed by them) but instead inducts whoever arrives there into a culturally constructed category of the “refugee”— one that goes beyond legal status and is encoded in the spatial logic of the site, which, due to its material nature, can be observed and documented.
I began photographing this site in early 2025, when I was invited there to work on a socially engaged project organized by a Finnish cultural organization Ko-Koo-Mo. Before visiting the reception center for the first time, I had already been familiar with the system in which it operates—having arrived in Finland as a Ukrainian recipient of temporary protection, I was obliged to register for and use some of the services that these places provide. During the socially engaged project, I visited the site almost daily to co-create artistic and conversational encounters, listening to the stories, reflections, and concerns shared by the reception center's residents. Simultaneously, I began paying special attention to the political dimensions of the spatial organization of materials, signs, and objects surrounding me, and started documenting them with my film camera. This process resulted in over 400 photographs, from which the images were selected for this exhibition.
About the work:
Suspension in Other Terms was created from the desire to re-present the immediate material conditions of the site in ways that bring (back) to light the naturalized agents of state control present within the reception center, while acknowledging my own—photographer's—surveilling position in relation to that very site (with my gaze, however, reversed—directed back at the institution instead of its dwellers). Simultaneously, this work intends to acknowledge and visually reflect on what might be understood as a more common or generalized refugee experience: being suspended bureaucratically, spatially, and temporally; waiting; repeatedly confronting matters of death; configuring oneself anew, or facing the imperative to do so, being pressured into configurations not of one's choosing. Suspension in Other Terms also draws from observations of the repetitive nature of refugee infrastructure: how buildings, waiting rooms, and various other accommodations maintain similar visual and spatial patterns even when they are located in places geographically distant from each other.
The visual instruments employed in the work include intentionally patterned presentation of both photographic positives and negatives, as well as visible de- and re-construction of imagery (several works are composed of smaller photographic elements visibly bound with iron wire). I also considered which knowledge is and is not available to the viewers: exhibited photographs deliberately feature spaces that residents of the reception center encounter daily, alongside those they rarely see or are fully prohibited from entering.
It is crucial to note that the exhibition was located in a place continuously inhabited by people with varied life experiences, religious and political beliefs, ages, and aesthetic sensibilities, who generally could not avoid seeing the work because it was installed in a frequently used corridor between their rooms. This significantly impacted the artistic outcome: the visual language, themes, tone, selected imagery, mode of presentation, and used materials were carefully considered during the six months preceding the installation period. The exhibition was positively received, and I hope that even for those who did not express their opinion to me directly, I stood up to the challenge with ethical and artistic integrity.
Team:
Producer: Annukka Ketola/Ko-Koo-Mo Ry
Technical consultant (installation): Sophea Lerner/Phonebox Productions
With gratitude also to Finnish Darkroom Association (Mörk) x HIAP/USRP for generously providing me with darkroom access, and to SWAMP: Art Material Swap and Waste Management Point for providing access to reused artistic materials that were incorporated into parts of this exhibition.
This exhibition was held in the framework of the Reconstruction II project organized by Ko-Koo-Mo Ry in collaboration with Kriisikeskus Turku and funding from the Arts Promotion Center Finland (Taike).
Suspension in Other Terms forms part of the Notation for the Surveyors of the Interminable—my ongoing testimonial project examining displaced people’s imagined and physical sites of dwelling.
Works in the exhibition:
Footnotes:
1. In Finland, “reception center” is a name for places of long-term accommodation provided by the state to asylum seekers, as well as applicants and recipients of temporary protection. “[They] are maintained by many operators: the Finnish Immigration Service, Finnish municipalities, organisations, and companies. All reception centres offer the same reception services to the people who live there, and all reception centres operate according to the same principles. The Finnish Immigration Service directs, plans, and supervises the practical operations of all reception centres.” — https://migri.fi/en/living-in-a-reception-centre
2. “Temporary protection is an exceptional measure to provide immediate and temporary protection in the event of a mass influx or imminent mass influx of displaced persons from non-EU countries who are unable to return to their country of origin.” — https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/migration-and-asylum/asylum-eu/temporary-protection_en. Within this text, “temporary protection” refers to the Temporary Protection Directive activated by the Council of the EU in response to the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
3. In Finland, recipients of temporary protection get full access to social welfare and public healthcare only after they have lived in Finland for at least a year, and through that, became eligible for municipality of residence (with some exceptions, which include, e.g., working with an employment contract). Until then, their access to these services is on par with that of asylum applicants: healthcare is predominantly provided by a nurse working in the reception center, whereas public healthcare is directly accessible only in case of life-threatening emergencies. Similarly, financial assistance at that time is also provided by the reception center and is almost twice as low as that offered through the public welfare services. On healthcare, see, for example: https://www.eu-healthcare.fi/whats-new/health-services-for-persons-arriving-in-finland-from-ukraine-health-services-transferred-from-reception-centres-to-wellbeing-services-counties-according-to-municipality-of-residence/. On financial assistance, see: https://www.kela.fi/how-the-war-in-ukraine-affects-the-benefits-available-from-kela