ANTTI OIKARINENAn Attempt to Understand 16.4.2022 – 15.5.2022

An Attempt to Understand is, to date, the most personal of the exhibitions I have held. It can perhaps even be seen as a kind of self-portrait. The ideas behind it have germinated in my mind for a long time. Turning them into actual works of art has been surprisingly difficult, if also quite inspiring.

In creating the exhibition, I was especially thinking about the concept of the artwork’s identity as well as that of its content and meaning on a general level. However, the exhibition is also an attempt to achieve an understanding of my own practice, my own thought processes, and the nature of my artistic interests. Why does something seem interesting to me and not something else? Where do the choices come from that make the work precisely what it is? In the works featured in this exhibition, I have sought to capture that elusive boundary between explicability and the surrounding incomprehensibility.

An Attempt to Understand was born out of curiosity, the desire to understand, and the curiosity-whetting fact that things always remain beyond the reach of our understanding.

I would like to thank Arts Promotion Centre Finland for supporting the exhibition. I also want to thank Heli Ketomäki for her assistance in finalising several of the works and Henri Laukkanen for his invaluable insights in the development of the piece entitled Explanation.

Antti Oikarinen