Opening on Thursday, September 29, from 5 - 7 Pm. Welcome!

Press release 19 September 2011 Axel Straschnoy BOXES September 30 - October 23, 2011, MUU galleria

Opening on Thursday, September 29, from 5 - 7 pm. Welcome!

Boxes brings together a series of works that while belonging together, having been designed as a group, had only partially been built and had always been exhibited separately. The works are a reﬂ ection on photography as a representational technique but also as something that allows us to see things we would not otherwise see, or to archive and document a moment.

Contextos de Exhibicións de un Marco Negro (2007) is a small frame with its glass painted black. Instead of allowing us to see inside, it reﬂ ects our sight. At the same time, the frame is a pinhole camera, taking a picture of every exhibition in which it is shown. Thus the piece creates a record of its own history.

A Box that can Capture and Store Light (2009-11) is a simple contraption that uses e properties of two-way mirrors to store light in a pure form, without an image. Like the negative it saves for the future the light that was at a speciﬁ c point in time in a speci ﬁ c place. As opposed to the negative, there is no image, nothing to see, just pure light.

Interior de un Cubo Blanco (2009) is a simple cube, made of acrylic on three of its sides and of wood in the others. What is inside in unknown. The only way to ﬁ nd out being to use a slot on the side if the cube to place a ﬁlm holder. Exposing a negative in this way allows us to take a look at what is inside.

All of these works are accompanied by photographs that present their inner workings, the process of development and the view inside the cube.

The exhibition as a whole replicates the way of working of the pieces on display. The exhibition space has been divided in half. On one side, the works are installed. This space in inaccessible to the spectators who stay on the other side, where the exhibition is projected through a system of lenses. The exhibition is also viewable from the street through the window.

Straschnoy's work is organized around projects with an internal formal and content coherence. His previous project, The New Artist (2008- ) was premiered at Keravan Taidemuseo last year and will be part of the show Quod Erat Demostratum, part of the AND Festival, in Liverpool, opening on September 28.

Axel Straschnoy was born in Buenos Aires in 1978 and lives and works in Helsinki. He has exhibited individually among others at Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo), Galerie Xippas (Paris), Galería Dabbah Torrejón (Buenos Aires), and Finnish Museum of Photography, Kerava Art Museum. He has participated in the Pavillon program at Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and has been a fellow at The Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, USA). - - -

Additional Program: Discussion between Leevi Haapala and Axel Straschnoy, on Monday October 10 at 18:00 (in English). Projection of the ﬁ lm Camera, on Monday October 17 at 18:00.

- - - The exhibition is supported by Arts Council of Finland, Arts Council of Helsinki Metropolitan Region and Alfred Kordelin Foundation.

More information: Timo Soppela / MUU galleria, [email protected], +358-(0)9-625 972, http://www.muu.fi