Felicia Honkasalo

Photographer

What is it that drives us to collect and categorize in order to conserve a human past? A central theme in my work is a deep interest in photographs, and how the constructed image from different times still lives on in the way we see, read and create images today. I like to play with the complexities of narrating history through photographs and documents, and the resulting work is often one that merges narrative methods common to diaries, scrapbooks and encyclopedias. This type of approach to narrative creates an archive consisting of altered historically meaningful documents and artifacts that merge and contradict personal memories, while both serve as evidence of a time past.  The images I want to create are discreet, silent and transparent, always hinting at something that is not in the image, not in the object, but something that appears in the tension that is present in the image. Using archival images, objects, documents and binding these into a narrative with my own photographs, I want to question the limitations and possibilities of the photographic object as a laborer of memory.   Felicia Honkasalo is a visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland. She is also part of the collective Honkasalo-Niemi-Virtanen. Her first book Grey Cobalt will be published by Conveyor Editions in September, 2017.