COINCIDENCE

 

Coincidence Points the Way 

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Golden Age, Marita Liulia’s latest collection of works, has different origins than her earlier ones. Not just because of their the different media and the different teams involved – they have always changed as a matter of course. The change now was more thorough – the various parts of Golden Age were interwoven without any precise advance plan. 

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‘My works have always had a literary starting point. I come up with an idea or theme that I test with background research and then I work on the script. This stage takes years, for my themes are broad, as in Choosing My Religion, my previous set of works, which compares world religions. When writing the script, I am looking for the best forms for the work, and I usually end up learning a new form of expression or technique’, she says. 

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But occasionally coincidences also point the way. They just have to be taken up. 

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‘When I was negotiating about a series of short films, the production counsellor remarked that why aren’t you contemporary artists ever interested in your own country. Return of the Goddess, my short film that had just been completed, had been filmed on three continents. And I thought, why not? Finland is now living in a period of challenges in the midst of an economic recession, restructuring and migration.’ 

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Observing Finland in rapid transformation, Marita began to plan a series of portraits of native-born and immigrant Finns. At the same time, she studied the history of photographic portraiture, for example work by Lewis Carroll, Edward S. Curtis and Alfred Stieglitz. 

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‘I found a studio, where fine daylight from the south is filtered through large trees. The rear wall was painted matte black and the large table there was varnished black. I came up with the shiny table when photographing Fanni Kare, the daughter of my friend, who looked at her own refection in the surface of the black varnished table.’ 

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Marita photographed people in the manner of 17th-century painted portraits: against a dark background, without make-up and so that the essential features are the face, hair and some element, for example of dress. Gold was included in many of the portraits. 

During the photographing and afterwards, surprising turns of events and people appearing by chance led the work as a whole forwards. The symbol of the exhibition, a small girl holding her hands up before a large painting, was created by chance. The girl is the grand-daughter of Marita’s friend. 

‘Six-year-old Vilma Kolehmainen suddenly became the central figure of the exhibition. I had thought that children were hard to photograph, but Vilma enjoys being in front of and behind the camera. She has an exceptional presence and, like children, she liked to play in the studio. 

During a break in the filming of a video she started to jump on bubble wrap. The painting Black Planets, which was being packaged, was behind her. I asked Vilma to stop, I got my camera and that was the picture. I realised immediately that the picture resembled in a canny way Ad Astra painted by Gallen-Kallela a century earlier.’ 

 

Although this wasn’t the idea in the photography stage, the photographs began to reveal other similarities with old paintings. 

‘On one occasion, my model was unable to come, but the light was excellent and I spent a couple of days photographing myself with antique pieces of coral. I showed my series of some two hundred pictures to a friend of mine who said that one of the photographs brought to mind Helene Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits.’ 

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The photographed subjects included dancers and their language of movement led in an unforced way to video pieces. In addition, Marita painted large multi-part works at an increasingly faster pace, with gold and lava as their main materials. 
 

‘At first, I didn’t know where these portraits and paintings would go, and I was surprised myself by their number.’ 

Marita drew up a production plan for a large series of works to which she gave the title Golden Age and sent it to Pauli Sivonen, director of the Serlachius Museums. 

‘We had never met before, but I was impressed by his work. Our collaboration came under way, and Pauli felt that the new pavilion of the Gösta Museum was the only venue with enough space for the large paintings, photographs, videos and the installation, which would cover the whole 12-metre rear wall.’ 

Pauli also liked Marita’s idea of including in the exhibition paintings from the museum’s collection and loans of works from elsewhere. The other works included, among others, Red Head II by Helene Schjerfbeck, which the Serlachius Foundation had just bought. Ad Astra by Gallen-Kallela was loaned by the Signe and Ane Gyllenberg Foundation. Golden Age was prepared with 2017 in mind, when Finland would celebrate its centenary, the artist would turn 60, and Vilma, the muse of the exhibition, would be 10. 

The  final form of the exhibition was developed in a natural way in collaboration with scenographer Tarja Väätänen and lighting designer Eero Auvinen. 

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Theatre and cooperation with theatrical professionals has been important for Marita throughout her career. Shining in the middle of the exhibition room is golden pavilion and looming in the background is the dramatically lit Wave, consisting of 400–500 pieces of plastic. 

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At the same time, two books began to be prepared, Golden Age with texts and photographs by Marita, and the present volume. 

‘Finland’s first golden age was at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when artists were creating national identity. I would date the beginning of Finland’s second golden age to the 1970s, when it rapidly became one of the world’s most highly developed and affluent countries. When I was preparing the exhibition, I explored how the earlier golden ages had come about and thought of how Finland’s next golden age might be created. And what a golden age in general means to contemporary people.’