Beneath the Surface
2025 · Mordançage on silver gelatin Approximately 20 works, dimensions variable
Easton Hansakäytävä is a shopping mall in eastern Helsinki, in a part of the city that is genuinely multicultural — more layered, more diverse, more alive in certain ways than the wealthier centre with its managed homogeneity and international chains. The mall connects directly to the metro, making it a daily passage point for the surrounding neighbourhoods. For many residents it is not an optional consumer destination but a corridor: the route from home to the rest of the city, the place to find food and goods from dozens of different cultures, a node in the daily life of communities that don't always appear in the city's self-image.
It is also struggling. Demolition is under public discussion.
Beneath the Surface photographs the mall's passageways, materials, and overlooked corners — the architectural details that accumulate meaning through daily use rather than design intention. What begins as apparently straightforward images of a commercial interior gradually reveals something else: surfaces buckling, dissolving, lifting away from themselves. The emulsion of each print has been attacked by mordançage — copper chloride, acid, and hydrogen peroxide — which destabilises the densest highlights first, raising the photographic surface in fragile veils that billow and resettle unpredictably. Every print is unique, unstable, and irreproducible.
The work operates in the space between document and elegy. These are photographs of a real place that serves real communities, made using a process of controlled, irreversible destruction — and originally exhibited inside the mall itself, under the Art for All festival banner of “Success & Glory.” The irony is quiet but structural: mordançage enacts on the photographic surface what economic logic is doing to the building. What looks solid is already coming apart. What appears to be architectural photography is something being eaten away.
The prints are fragile things inside a fragile place. They may outlast the building they depict.
Exhibition History
Pimiö 25 Exhibition Galleria West, Helsinki · September 2025 Group exhibition showcasing analogue processes.
Art for All Festival — “Success & Glory” Easton Hansakäytävä, Helsinki · August 2025 Solo exhibition of approximately 20 mordançage prints, installed along the mall corridor and inside a disused office space — formerly a book club room — within the mall itself.
Gallery
Related
- Notebook: Beneath the Surface — Process, installation, and reflections on making the work
- Quantum Mordançage Zine — Related exploration of mordançage as conceptual practice
For inquiries about this work or exhibitions, please contact me.