• THEY COULD HEAR A FARAWAY THUNDER
    They could hear a faraway thunder 2, 2022
    archival pigment print, glass, wooden frame
    169 x 134 cm
    ed. 6
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    THEY COULD HEAR A FARAWAY THUNDER


    "They could hear a faraway thunder     is a continuation of my long-term work, which re-animates the colonial history and legacy of Arctic explorations.
     
    In ´narrating the North´ I often use archival sources and different techniques of re-photography, exploring and visualizing relations of history, knowledge, landscape and culture. Through experiences of travel and borderland I wish to create a matrix of fact and fiction, a field of fantasy and geographical imagination."
     
    "Themes of disappearance and loss are characteristic to my work. Archival images I am re-photographing acquire a patina, both physical and historical, that links them with the passage of time. Dust, cracks and scratches so typical to my images work as a sort of secret manuscripts. Through the cracked glass plates the viewer can imagine an additional content and layers of different times and histories.

    Dust makes palpable the elusive passing of time."
     
    - Jorma Puranen
    • Jorma Puranen Archaeology of ice, 2022 archival pigment print, glass, wooden frame 170 x 131 cm ed. 6 ( (ed. of 3 also available in a smaller size 105 x 84 cm)
      Jorma Puranen
      Archaeology of ice, 2022
      archival pigment print, glass, wooden frame
      170 x 131 cm
      ed. 6 ( (ed. of 3 also available in a smaller size 105 x 84 cm)
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    • Jorma Puranen Does the mountain have a memory, 2023 archival pigment print, glass, wooden frame 105 x 84 cm ed. 3 (ed. of 6 also available in a larger size 170 x 134 cm)
      Jorma Puranen
      Does the mountain have a memory, 2023
      archival pigment print, glass, wooden frame
      105 x 84 cm
      ed. 3 (ed. of 6 also available in a larger size 170 x 134 cm)
      Enquire
  • Archives expanded
    Paris doesn’t answer, 2023
    archival pigment print, glass, wooden frame
    144 x 179 cm 
    ed. 6
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    Archives expanded

    Different archives have continually played a relevant part in Jorma Puranen's artistic methods. Archives have acted as starting points or reservoirs of knowledge, always through a distinctive, fragmentary approach. In recent years, he has turned more and more to his own collection of photographs he has taken and collected throughout the years, focusing perhaps more on self-referential reflection than physical exploration and travel. On the other hand, Puranen has gradually expanded the notion of an archive beyond its traditional limits, and made use of aerial views and satellite images from various sources.

    The nocturnal cityscape shown on Paris doesn't answer, consists of a photograph taken by the artist from the top of the Eiffel tower almost 30 years ago. Puranen wanted the arctic landscapes to have a counterpart from a different kind of a world, an urban realm. The name of the work is a play on the Finnish translation of a classic sci-fi novel by Fred Hoyle from 1966. The Finnish title of the novel about a temporal twist and movement of time refers to a city fallen to a dream-like stasis, with no signals coming or leaving the radio towers.

     

    • Jorma Puranen Twin peaks, 2019 archival pigment print, diasec, framed 53 x 102,5 cm ed. 6
      Jorma Puranen
      Twin peaks, 2019
      archival pigment print, diasec, framed
      53 x 102,5 cm
      ed. 6
      € 6,000.00
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  • "In this new body of work, I have used satellite images and aerial views of the Arctic vistas. The role of archives, dreams, memories and time are deployed to create transient and accidental visual forms, which aim to encapsulate multiple, inter-woven temporalities.
     
    In my photographs the found visual material reappears as though from a lost (or future) world, becoming manifest in a ghost form.
     
    - Jorma Puranen
     
  • Jorma Puranen, Manic meteors and sleepy planets 1, 2020 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Jorma Puranen, Manic meteors and sleepy planets 2, 2020 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Jorma Puranen, Manic meteors and sleepy planets 3, 2020 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Jorma Puranen, Manic meteors and sleepy planets 1, 2020
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  • A playlist by the artist and views from the studio A playlist by the artist and views from the studio A playlist by the artist and views from the studio A playlist by the artist and views from the studio

    A playlist by the artist and views from the studio

  • Inspiration and process

    Detail of Black Snow: The 1968 Thule nuclear disaster by Jorma Puranen The project is based on dramatic events in the North during Cold War, on January 21, 1968. An American B-52 bomber crashed on the ice at Thule in northern Greenland. The bomber carried 4 nuclear weapons that were destroyed (one of them is said to have gone missing into the ocean depths). The radioactive material was spread over a large area of the ice field. The events characterise a profound neglect of the interests of indigeneous people. (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Stereographic polar projection, 1825 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    The moon, lenses, lights and reflections (View more details about this item in a popup).
    A detail of a collotype portrait from "Lapons, Collection du Prince R. Bonaparte", 1886 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Jorma Puranen: Language is a Foreign Country 12 (Wind Words), 2001, framed pigment print, 160 x 198 cm. The texts on the silk flags are words for different kinds of winds in Sámi and Greenlandic languages. The wind moving the flags places the languages back into the landscape in a written form, missing from maps named by colonial nations. (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Testproofs at printlab Artproof, for Horizon Variations (Isikajia), 2019 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Wall paintings by Fancois-Auguste Biard at La Galerie de Minaralogie et le Geologie at Paris. Biard completed the paintings in 1840 after taking part at an expedition to the Arctic. (View more details about this item in a popup).
    A photograph of the Norwegian explorer, biologist and humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen with his companions observing a solar eclipse on an ice sheet on 6.4.1894. (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Images of a stereo negative and a drawing of mountain peaks (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Detail from a silkscreen installation A Brief History of the Overseas Mountains, 2022 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Silkscreen prints at the Kalasataman seripaja, 2022 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Tintypes (ie. melainotypes, ferrotypes) are an early form of photography, where the image is produced on a thin metal plate. (View more details about this item in a popup).
    An infrared satellite image of a storm /NASA (View more details about this item in a popup).
    A detail of an old educational map (View more details about this item in a popup).

    Detail of Black Snow: The 1968 Thule nuclear disaster by Jorma Puranen
    The project is based on dramatic events in the North during Cold War, on January 21, 1968. An American B-52 bomber crashed on the ice at Thule in northern Greenland. The bomber carried 4 nuclear weapons that were destroyed (one of them is said to have gone missing into the ocean depths). The radioactive material was spread over a large area of the ice field. The events characterise a profound neglect of the interests of indigeneous people.

  • Dream photography
    Jorma Puranen
    Photographie du Réve 2, 2023
    hand coated silver gelatin prints on metal
    37 x 32 cm
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    Dream photography

    The inspiration to Jorma Puranen's series of silver gelatin prints lies in the early forms of photography, and the sense of freedom and adventure intrinsic to photography at that time.

    Of all the various techniques and experiments of tha era, these archive-based pieces draw their names from the ideas of a French photographer and self-proclaimed scientist Louis Darget, who thought he could capture the thoughts of a person on a photograph.

    These unique pieces have been specially printed in France with and old method using silver gelatin on a metal plate, and afterwards carefully hand-coated and framed.
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  • Jorma Puranen, Arctic Shark, 1984/2023 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Jorma Puranen, Photographie du Réve 1, 2023 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Jorma Puranen, Photographie du Réve 2, 2023 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Jorma Puranen, Photo...de la Pensée, 2023 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Jorma Puranen, Arctic Shark, 1984/2023
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  • Talking pictures
    Horizon Variations (Isikajia), 2019
    archival pigment print, glass, wooden frame
    9 parts
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    Talking pictures

    “My work is about ‘narrating the North’, creating a field of fantasy and geographical imagination. 
     
    In it, I am exploring and visualising relationships between history, knowledge, landscape, and culture. Re-thinking the Arctic colonialism through a poetics of memory and the historical.
     
    And, on a more abstract level, themes of disappearance and loss."

    - Jorma Puranen, in     Talking Pictures – discussion with Alasdair Foster
  • Jorma Puranen, Moonlit route to Umvik Bay 1, 2019 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Jorma Puranen, Greenland Icecap, 2023 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Jorma Puranen, Antenna, 2023 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Jorma Puranen, Uummannak, 2023 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Jorma Puranen, Moonlit route to Umvik Bay 1, 2019
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  • JORMA PURANEN

    JORMA PURANEN is one on Finland’s most celebrated photographers, known for his Nordic landscapes with a conceptual approach. Considerations of the relationship of past and present are crystallised in Puranen’s work in photography. In his many different yet always equally compelling and precisely executed projects, he has worked in a wide-ranging manner with various historical visual sources since the early 1990s. Puranen’s works highlight the material nature of photography: the grains of the photograph, the relief created by printing ink and light reflected from the surface of a photographic print parallel the original visual motifs and gain a central role. Light reflected from the surface of pictures prevents the viewer from seeing the image as a whole, which in the artist’s thinking is a metaphor of the difficulty of understanding history. The variety of methods offers the viewer a rich visual thicket with a visual idiom that is both challenging and poetic. 

    Jorma Puranen (b. 1951, Finland) studied photographic art at the University of Art and Design Helsinki from 1973 to 1978, and served as a professor of photography from 1995 to 1998. His works are in numerous museums and collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie collection in Paris, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm. In recent years, he has held solo exhibitions at venues such as Ars Nova, Turku; Luleå Konsthall; Purdy Hicks, London; and Bunka Gallery, Higashikawa, Japan. Puranen has participated in many group exhibitions, including at LACMA Museum, Los Angeles; Kunsthalle Helsinki; Stadtgalerie Kiel; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Museum of Photography, Thessaloniki; and National Gallery, London.

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    JORMA PURANEN