Heli Rekula. Female Body, Desert for Ever
Leevi Haapala
Heli Rekula, Desir� #3 "or… I just don?t know what to do with myself," 1999, digital colour print.
A blonde with a chocolate on her face. A little boy alone in a hotel room. Seals sliding from the beach into the sea. Finnish photographer and media artist Heli Rekula sets these images side by side as serial wholes in her mid-career retrospective exhibition: she questions the female body, human desire, minimalist human dramas and the relationship between humans and nature. In addition to her career as an artist, Rekula works as a photojournalist. On the shifts between these occupational roles, she says: "Making art is mostly a lonely and abstract kind of work, sometimes even frightening. That’s why I like to work occasionally as a press photographer and picture editor. It has allowed me to visit places and meet people that I would never have met otherwise."
The exhibition at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, emphasized the two sides of Rekula’s artistic production: the filmic fictions and the un-manipulated photography. The division in works is made visible by colors and elemental structures in the exhibition architecture. The fourth floor of Kiasma is dedicated to Rekula’s fictional and meditative film installations. She explores silent trains, passing encounters and waiting in such works as Hotel, 1991/2005 and Skein, 2000. In the latter the visual expression comes close to USA-based "mother of the avant-garde" Maya Deren’s film called Ritual In Transfigured Time, 1946. Meditative video installations for two projectors create dense images and endlessly moving narratives. The large fifth floor exhibition space displays portraits, landscape photographs and documentary video works.
Rekula’s entrée into the art world in the early 1990s was defined by her critical images of women; she produced works that seem in a continuum with Hannah Wilke’s self-portraits. In Rekula’s grotesque sadomasochistic photographs, she postures herself in front of the camera. In those one shot performances the narrative is left open to the viewer. In photograph Hyperventilation, 1993 an apparently sci-fi mutant woman is suffocating in her own body: a diving mask with pipes circles air through her lower body holes. In another photograph Confused, 1993, the same frightening woman sits in a corner wearing a latex mask with Minnie Mouse ears and a dildo on her face, body hairs unshaved. In her latest photos, Rekula takes food showers with ingredients such as light margarine, milk and honey. These materials, slicked on top of her athletic upper body, produce a second skin. Several viewers convulse while looking at these photographs–nothing so stimulating as aromatherapy.
Beside the self-photographs there emerges two series of portraits. In an ascetic black and white portrait gallery from 1992-93, Rekula has photographed women of different ages against a neutral setting. Only models’ first names are listed. The strong presence of these individuals reminds me of Robert Capas documentary shots. "I study myself through my models, yet the most important thing in the picture is something that becomes meaningful to me in the photo shoot itself. It is a kind of sharing of a meaningful moment, a meeting," Rekula explains. Another series of color photographs entitled Meeting with an Erotic Artist, 1993-1999 reveal Rekula’s attitude to documentary photojournalism. In those pictures models expose their personalities, appearing more naked than if they had been undressed. Rekula has the rare ability to show and hide simultaneously.
Rekula combines a variety of photographic genres and traditions of Western visual culture. You can detect the influence of portraiture, fashion images, advertisements, religious icons and porn imagery in her visual vocabulary. She plays with the tension between purity and impurity. In her Pilgrimage, 1996 series, which consists of photographs and a two screen video installation, she combines altarpiece and advertisement in the form of an anorexic girl, who has stigmata in her open hands (Untitled, Stigmata). Rekula shows the continuum of art and commercial, intermingling these fields. Both disciplines are effective in shaping conceptions of beauty and bodily egos. Her "Desiré" photographs from 1996 and 2004 document a fateful drama queen in bizarre postures and wig variations; she is a whimsical Alice in Wonderland. Obviously a woman’s body is still the site of performance and the object of continuous moulding process. In those sticky images there is also a sense of melancholia. One of the shots bears the name: Desiré #3 "or… I just don’t know what to do with myself."
Rekula’s landscape panoramas, such as Landscape no.1. Escaping Horizon, 1998, have been numbered and named according to the site of the photograph or the object in the image. To Rekula, the landscape is more like a state of mind, not a geographical location. The horizon seems to escape the beholder. It is also impossible to locate the photographer in the landscape. In her empty landscapes, people are usually visible only by the traces they have left behind: cars, jetties or engraved autographs in cactuses. And still, the enormous scale of the pictures opens the image, like the scenery in paintings from the Romantic era. In her photographs men are almost absent. There is one, perhaps there to represent them all. He is naked and playing the role of a peeing dog.
From Rekula’s Landscape no. 8, Tired, 1999 photograph, the curators printed a monumental wallpaper to one of the museum’s gallery spaces, a room with a panoramic view of Helsinki. The title of the exhibition, "Desert," becomes a metaphor for the struggle that contemporary women have with their bodies and how they are viewed.
Heli Rekula’s retrospective "Desert: Works from 1989-2004," was on display at the Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, from February 5 through April 24, 2005.
