Venue: Persons Projects | Helsinki School, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

During Gallery Weekend Berlin 2022.

Persons Projects is proud to present Milja Laurila’s Untitled Women series, which utilizes a present day feminist lens to understand how women have historically been viewed by men.

The 1930s book titled Woman. An Historical Gynæcological and Anthropological Compendium acts as a point of departure for Laurila’s work. Originally published in German in 1885 and written by three men, the book is illustrated with hundreds of photographs of naked women and children from all over the world, primarily colonized countries. This cross between anthropology, racism, and sexism, come together to create an uncomfortable viewing experience that claims to be ‘scientific’. The photographed women have no voice and they are presented as exotic specimens found in nature. The ethnographic pictorial style allowed the pretence of looking at women objectively and innocently. The exoticizing gaze, with its sexual desire, was hidden behind the veneer of legitimate scientific inquiry.

Kristján Gudmundsson | Jarosław Kozłowski | Ville Kumpulainen | Milja Laurila | Dominik Lejman

We proudly present the group exhibition Inconsistent Ways of Seeing, highlighting the correlation between image and language. The five artists selected for this presentation all work in different medias and share a mutual interest in exploring their diverse points of view dealing with the relationship between text and visual art. They are all connected by how they challenge the subject of association with what we see and assume based upon our knowledge and experience of correlating the image with the words that define it. This disassociation process disrupts the identity relationship between the verbal and the visual encouraging abstract thinking.

Combining text with images has a long history in art and especially so in the last century, with Dadaism, Surrealism, Fluxus and the emergence of Conceptual Art. The artists in the 1960s and 70s treated language as an equal element in their works, creating a new perspective on interpreting and presenting ideas. This exhibition continues this dialogue with works spanning over the last three decades.