About the project “The Mind Seemed to Grow Giddy by Looking So Far into the Abyss of Time”

Exhibition Ilmoille Haihtuvat Polut // About the project “The Mind Seemed to Grow Giddy by Looking So Far into the Abyss of Time”

Hanna Råst’s body of work explores the remnants of photographic culture.

In our contemporary world, photography is often experienced as a rapid stream of images across screens, but here, it is present as an imprint pressed into the ground. This collection serves as a reminder of the material needs behind the seemingly intangible nature of photography, and questions what will be left of us and our (visual) culture in the end. Perhaps, as technology advances, it is not the photographs themselves that will endure, but rather the tools used to create them—the metallic, plastic, and glass instruments that will be buried in the earth, only to be uncovered later.

The literary scholar and photography theorist Roland Barthes wrote about the concept of "punctum" in his work Camera Lucida (1980). According to Barthes, punctum is that aspect of a photograph’s testimony that is not objectively visible or provable through shared cultural meanings, but something personally touching, creating a direct, intuitive connection between the viewer and the image. The Latin word "punctum" has given rise to words in many European languages that refer to a point (as in "point" or "punkt") or piercing (as in "puncture").

In this body of work, objects emerge from the ground and catch the viewer’s eye, perhaps evoking a pang of emotion when something familiar or inexplicable is seen. The word "PUNCTUM," engraved on a slab, raises questions: Why was this slab made, and where does it come from? For whom is the text intended, and what is it meant to convey? Is it a factual instruction, part of a sentence, or a name? When words or images are removed from their original context, we are left to fill in the gaps ourselves. In Råst’s works, photographs are often acted upon: they are found, altered, manipulated, covered, torn, combined with other images, or placed in environments that shift their original meaning. The artist, who manipulates the image, is visibly present between the final work, the viewer (us), and the original material.

Pompeii, buried under the ash of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, was one of the birthplaces of European archaeology. Literature and entertainment about Pompeii’s destruction often center around the idea of objects found from the area, frozen as snapshots of the moment of ruin. Today, destruction is anticipated in the form of an ecological disaster brought on by climate change. Unlike the inhabitants of Pompeii, who were caught off guard by the destruction of the erupting volcano (though Vesuvius had given signs of activity, but these were not interpreted correctly), many today are actively fearful of the future, paralyzed by a mixture of knowledge, uncertainty, predictions, and political frustration.

Archaeological excavations bring buried objects to the surface, casting them into the light and making them visible through plaster casts. Fragments of the past tell us about history, but they also serve as platforms for our hopes and perceptions of the world. In everyday life, photographs—whether self-taken or inherited from decades past—are brought out as evidence of something that has already happened or to support fragile memories. Over time, history itself evolves as new information surfaces, and by piecing it together, we form a more coherent picture of life.

Like film exposed to light, on which an image is drawn, an object dug out from the ground becomes a picture of the past only when viewed under our gaze and bright lights. A shard of pottery becomes a valuable discovery only when we encounter it a thousand years after its creation. A piece of plastic from a disposable camera takes on different meanings depending on the context: it may be a memento of a moment shared with loved ones, a symbol of anxiety over plastic pollution, or part of a narrative about a past culture that developed a camera model to capture the memories of millions of people.

In this body of work, the possible time frames and contexts for objects and viewing become entangled. In the end, it is unclear in which time we, the viewers, are standing when faced with these discoveries. The sculptures imitate not only historical excavations but also the imagery of science fiction. We can imagine ourselves in the shoes of a future human (or some other being), discovering unrecognizable objects from the past, from another culture, perhaps from an alien planet.