THE WONDROUS WAY OF FORCES
When I studied German Philology at the University of Tampere in the early nineties, I had several heroes in the realms of German literature, philosophy and arts. For me, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875– 1926) was by far the brightest star. He was also the one who accompanied me in bed, more or less every night. I kept reading the Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien, 1922) over and over again and marvelled as he claimed that “each angel is horrible”. I travelled to Paris to visit the Jardin des Plantes, where Rilke wrote his famous poem about a panther in a cage that occasionally lets an image of the outside world enter its visual perception, until it ceases in the heart (Der Panther, 1903).
One spectacular sentence in Rilke’s poem Archaic Torso of Apollo (Archaïscher Torso Apollos, 1908) – “You must change your life” – echoed like an imperative in my head, even to this day. Therefore it is only natural that the final exhibition that I have curated for the Finnland-Institut, now that my work there is coming to an end, draws inspiration from my favourite poet. Our new Visiting Art/ists 2024 exhibition is called Ich finde dich in allen diesen Dingen – I find you in all these things. Rilke wrote his highly existential poem with the same title exactly 125 years ago in Berlin. It was published a few years later in The Book of Hours (Das Stunden-Buch, 1905). I personally interpret the text as a tendency to discover traces of those that we have loved, who may have existed in our lives before moving on or passing away, in objects and sensations – physical or metaphysical – that surround us. We find them in all these things: in pictures, paintings and books or scents and sounds, through all of our senses. It is possible that Rilke found the divine in nature, perhaps in the trees that he so beautifully describes.
For the Finnland-Institut exhibition we have brought together six artists, mostly Berlin-based, either with existing works that resonate with the topic or brand new interpretations of it. For many, Rilke’s poem functioned as a starting point for the commissioned works that were created for the group show that now takes over our premises on Friedrichstraße, Berlin. They provide delight and comfort for those who visit the exhibition. Our Visiting Art/ist programme is not a residency, but rather its idea is to offer artists the opportunity to present their work in a space that allows for diverse encounters. The artists in the programme have been, in chronological order: Ville Kylätasku, Anna Retulainen, Anni Leppälä, Niina Lehtonen Braun, Markus Jäntti, Helena Kauppila, Jukka Korkeila, Isabella Chydenius and now Jussi Goman, Jussi Jääskeläinen, Laura Kärki, Antti Pussinen, Jarkko Räsänen and Elsa Salonen.
I hope that you enjoy this book that we have made for you and that you will have the opportunity to visit us in Berlin. Ich finde dich in allen diesen Dingen – I find you in all these things runs until November 2024.
Elsa Salonen (born 1984 in Turku, Finland) uses multiple techniques for creating natural pigments that she applies in her installations and paintings. She meticulously processes her materials of choice, from grinding seashells and meteorites to distilling colours from flowers. Salonen is known for her artistic interpretation of alchemist knowledge and for the profound way in which she uses life and death as one of the central themes in her works. She has had exhibitions in Berlin, Bogotá, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Innsbruck and Seoul, among others, and her works are featured in the collections of the Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art (FI), the Saastamoinen Foundation (FI), and the Lissone Museum of Contemporary Art (IT), for instance.
MIKA MINETTI In our exhibition I fnd you in all these things we have a couple of your installations. Could you tell us a little bit about them?
ELSA SALONEN The installation Still Life with Flowers (Separation Funnels) from 2023 belongs to a so-called cut flower section of my practice. For these works, I distil colours from flowers, preserve the dyes in various ways, and bleach plants to make them appear entirely white. The technique is based on a notion that most organisms, both in the plant and the animal world, seem to lose their colours in death – flowers wither and bodies blanch. Thus, all the colours in nature signal the presence of a living force. The result in my three-dimensional paintings is a poetic separation of the vivid life energy (the preserved colours) from their empty, pale bodies (the bleached flowers).
The work Eighty Modest Statements About the Impossibility of Death (2013), instead, is a painted herbarium of 80 plant species. In this exhibition, I’m showing a selection of around 20–30 of the paintings. The images of the plants were painted with fox bones that I burned and ground into a pigment. With this work I ponder how at a certain level death doesn’t exist; living beings will be recycled infnitely as material.
Life simply takes new forms, plants grow from dead bodies, and so on. In 2013, these paintings were a way for me to process the then-recent death of a good friend. Wherever we had met each other, a fox often showed up.
MM How would you describe your artistic practice?
ES I prepare the pigments for my works by grinding a wide variety of raw materials such as stones, meteorites, seashells and animal bones, as well as by extracting colours from plants and algae. Each of the materials contains a special knowledge. I view the pigments as collaborators, whose ‘experiences’ define the conceptual message of each work. My practice draws on the traditions of painting, installation, and conceptual art, and the works are marked by the influences of science, animism, and alchemy. Mediaeval alchemists studied natural materials, which they also used to make colours. Through the materials, they sought to understand the surrounding universe as well as the interconnectedness of everything in the cosmos and the individual’s role amongst all others; oneself. One of the most important steps in alchemy was repeated distillation, which left the purest essence of the substance – and the alchemist – in the glass flask.
MM What does your creative process look like?
ES A new body of work is typically a process of a couple of years or so. It often starts very intuitively with weak, repetitive visions or ideas that invoke something in me. I then try to understand them by finding books, films etc. about the subject. Simultaneously I collect related materials from natural sites like forests, beaches and fields, or from a specialist – as in the case of meteorites and cut flowers. After this, I prepare colours from the collected matter and test how to paint with the created pigments. With each new material I use, I need to invent all the techniques again, so it’s a very time-consuming process. In addition, I design the metal stands for the works myself. And of course, between all these steps I create the artworks themselves!
