Finnish visual artist Lauri Astala and photographer Elina Brotherus are on holiday, their first in 15 years. A rule they are observing strictly is “no work” however hard it may be for the workaholics. Though Elina is distraught at having been forbidden to carry her camera, she is, with Lauri, soaking in the freedom of routine-less days spent out of their studios in Helsinki. The two are are lapping up tropical heat in Kochi.
They will, after this sabbatical, make videos of songs composed by another Finn, musician Eero Hameenniemi for Bombay Jayashri, after they go back to Finland. Meanwhile, the city is throwing up umpteen possibilities for collaborative work. “One such will be done on the trip,” says Elina with a smile, and Lauri, who has set the ‘no work’ embargo disagrees with a shake of his head. He too has not brought his computer along.
A visual artist, he came to India 26 years ago to study Indian cartography and cosmology. Having worked on the European context of map making, he researched temple architecture, and admired the style of the Gopura, “a tower leading up, in stages, to heaven.”
On that trip, he associated with academicians. At BHU, in Benaras, he studied from an old globe in the archives, about its Islamic form and Hindu content of creation.
“These were incredible things for me to learn,” he says, looking back on his first visit to India. He used the ideas learnt in sculpture, which was his practice. A move to Chicago, for higher studies, changed his perspective. He veered into the new electronic medium of video art and explored the play between reality and illusion. Much of Lauri’s current works are video installations. “I started to work on how we experience space through images,” he says, adding that representational technology like photography, television and film has altered the sense of reality.
Lauri’s works embed the viewer in a composed space where he/she becomes a part and engages in questions of their context in time and space. The experiential work should impart a sense of magic, he says. “You have to make everything so carefully that the magic is always there. The work has to be convincing.”
His work, ‘Disappearance’, when exhibited in Buenos Aires, created a flutter as it coincided with the news of finding remains of people who had disappeared during the dictatorship in the 70s. In Montevideo, the work was shown in a prison cell, where inmates shared their experiences on what disappearance means to them.
Inspired by the generation of women photographers like Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman, Elina studied photography in the 90s, an age preoccupied by themes of identity and self representation.
Just as the move to Chicago broadened Lauri’s perspective, a move to France changed the way Elina accessed photography. Italian Renaissance painters, Flemish Masters and their works deeply impacted her art. It grew figurative. For the next five years from 2000, she moved to making “just pictures”, cutting her off from her initial autobiographical works.
This was followed by her interest in the relationship between the model and the artist. She became both, puzzled at times by the identity of the model and the artist. At the time, she enjoyed working with the analogue camera, its “umbilical”cord connecting the model with the artist.
Ten years ago, Elina bought her first digital camera, switching to the new medium as laboratories processing print closed shop.
It was a hard changeover, finally brought about by holding an exhibition of photographs taken by both, analogue and digital camera. “The difference was hard to tell,” she says.
“The funny thing is that my art follows my life,” she says on the sudden reappearance of autobiographical photos in her work, when she turned 40. At a jaded stage in her career, she came across a show curated by Rene Block that was inspired by the fluxus movement and that fired her creativity. Stirred suitably, she began working as never before, shooting 10 frames a day.
It became her new style. She was nominated for Prix Elysée and won the Carte Blanche PMU prize in 2017, after a solo exhibition at Centre Pompidou.
On photographing herself, she says, “I have a very neutral relationship with the body—male or female—I watch it as an object and not for its sexual attributes.”
With recognition coming after a decade of hard work, she is now relishing it and the break along with Lauri.
“This is my first visit to India. I have a strong feeling that we will be back. This has been a great introduction,” she says ruing just one fact that both of them are without their work tools, no camera, no computer, taking photographs only on their smart phones.
