Liisa Lounila

Marabouparken proudly presents an exhibition with the Finnish artist Liisa Lounila (1976) who lives and works in Helsinki. Liisa Lounila works with film, photo and painting but regardless of the technique her works often situate themselves between the moving and still photographic image. The exhibition is a part of XPOSEPTEMBER – Stockholm photo festival.

Lounila gained international acclaim for the films Popcorn, Flirt and Play a series of lo-fi “film sculptures” with muffled soundscapes. These were made with a home-made 360° pin-hole camera that was created with the purpose of allowing Lounila to recreate three dimensional scenes. The films are made with the so-called time slice techique which gives the viewer the impression of movement round a series of frozen events. Bodies and objects seem to float freely in space. The scenes seem to get reconstructed and deconstructed simultaneously. Instead of a conventional, linear narrative, Lounila shows us gestures, memory flashes and details of vanished moments. These are the small parts of a bigger story that the artists let us glimpse but not fully comprehend. In her exhibition at Marabouparken Art Space the artist will be showing the films Flirt (2002), Play (2003), a series of light boxes entitled Roma (2003) and the text works Road Movie (1998) and Valour (2006).

In Play the viewer is given a three dimensional rendition of every gesture and glance of the audience of small and crowded basement club in Berlin. Dark Finnish pop contributes to the club atmosphere – both energetic and expectant. In Flirt a muffled, screechy soundtrack gives the film a threatening undercurrent in contrast to the slightly flirty and ballet like fight that is acted out by a group of people. In the series of light boxes, entitled Roma, black and white, three dimensional lenticular prints portrays interacting couples in intimate home settings. A voyeuristic feeling charcterizes this photoseries of images that becomes animated as the viewers move by. Road Movie is “text film” consisting of texts found on the internet that have been pieced together so that the original meaning becomes short-circuited.