Surface – Turku Biennial, Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova Musem, Turku, Finland, 2009
In Saara Ekström’s Cave
An intensive atmosphere is achieved by the visual artist Saara Ekström in her finely tuned installation titled The Cave, which takes a dive deep down under the surface.
The pitch of the multimedia installation is being set by the text on the wall, which begins by describing a hand being pushed into a sewer and emerging from it grasping a rope of hair, fat and dirt.
The theme of submerging under a surface is visualised by photographs of strands of hair in a sink and on the macro level by images of the geological folds on the earths surface, minerals, crystals and the stalagmites and stalactites of underground dripstone caves. In the very centre of the space kneels a sculpture by Aarre Aaltonen titled Maternitá from the year 1927. On the naked back of the statue rotates a reflection of a tangled root – in reality a tomography of blood veins of a human brain – which enables the viewer to see both the surface and what lies beyond it. The work is a striking continuum of the essential topics of Saara Ekström’s production – the psychological and geological time, surface and interior, beauty and ugliness, desire and repulsion and fundamentally the thematic of birth and death.
Lars Saari, Turun Sanomat, 3.7.2009.
