Hanna Råst: Travelers
15. 9. – 20. 10. 2021
curator: Lenka Sýkorová
photo: Markéta Bendová
video: Hanna Råst
Accompanying program:
Wednesday, 22nd September, 2- 4 pm workshop for children, 4- 5 pm curator-guided tour.
Presentification means full awareness of the present. Experiencing the moment here and now in the fullness of its power. Presentification also affects collective and personal memory and awareness of the upcoming future. Finnish artist Hanna Råst has been exploring for a long time the process of how we perceive time and what role our memory and photographic record of reality play in it. She calls her creative process "the archeology of time and memory." At the Travelers exhibition, she focused on memories and information trapped in data media. It often happens that in the heat of taking photographs of our experiences, we are unable to fully experience the present moment. And we all know the feeling that too many photographs lose their value and become alienated over time and that USB flash disks gradually become dysfunctional media that we still paradoxically perceive as part of our past and fetishize. At Hanna Råst’s current exhibition, our digital memory is dismantled and reconstructed, time is not perceived as a linear process and the timeline is actually broken up into parallel physical and virtual realities. The artist mainly points out how digital technologies shape our present.
Hanna Råst is a Finnish visual artist who explores the broad context of photography. Her intermedia artwork ranges from drawings and collages to objects, installations and site-specific artworks. She is fascinated by working with the archive in the context of history, time, archeology, memory and identity. Her layered artwork examines the position of photography as part of displaying memories in the present that is oversaturated with visual materials. She consciously creates a false process of time effects, and thus initiates a pseudo-archive of visual memories. By exploring the medium of photography, she often goes from two-dimensional photography to tri-dimensional objects with obvious traces of the technical-historical legacy of analog photography. She thus asks herself: how do we observe the world and how do we remember it?
Lenka Sýkorová
The exhibition is supported by Frame Finland.