Marja Pirilä – Light & Darkness

Marja Pirilä – Light & Darkness

Light is at the core of photographic artist Marja Pirilä’s work, like a foundation on which she has built her expansive artistic output over more than three decades. The Light & Darkness exhibition invites the viewer to linger on the intersection of light, space and time, and observe the surrounding world with fresh eyes. “In photography, I am endlessly fascinated by the immaterial light’s collision with the material. That and the dialogue between light and dark is what I have captured in the darkness of the camera obscura.”

The exhibition intertwines series of works made at different points in time and with different methods that ponder our relationship with our surroundings. At its centre is the ancient camera obscura phenomenon, which takes us to the roots of photography, to the birth of the image. While capturing different camera obscura series across Finland, Europe and Asia, Pirilä has turned people’s rooms and large buildings into camera obscuras, blending the interior and outdoor spaces together.

Pirilä’s work with the camera obscura method began with the Interior/Exterior series in 1996. “I realised that in the room I had turned into a camera obscura, I could capture both the person and the room’s interior as well as the view opening up from the window in one exposure – what a comprehensive method to show a person’s physical and mental sphere of life!” When the images projected into dark rooms also cover the people in them, they seem to blend into their surroundings. This is the experience that Pirilä wants to convey with her photos: we are not separate from our surroundings, but a part of their personality and nature.

Alongside the series of photographs, the exhibition features three-dimensional works that utilise and showcase the camera obscura phenomenon. “To share in real-time this living phenomenon of light that forms the basis of my photography and whose beauty and unexpectedness charm me again and again, I began to design sculptural camera obscura works.” In these multi-lensed works, the surrounding world is depicted as upside-down, ever-changing and overlapping reflections, challenging the viewer to see their surroundings in a new light. The works were made in collaboration with photographic artist Petri Nuutinen. The exhibition includes a soundscape created by musician Tapani Rinne.

In the photos of the Light Diaries series, which emerged in the course of the slow camera obscura work, the white pages of empty notebooks served as stages for the light. On them, Pirilä recorded her thoughts, using light to help her reach somewhere that words could not. The series is expanded by the video installation Light Notes, which is about light and presence – meditative moments, lifelines and sources of joy that have landed in the middle of everyday life.

Photographic artist Marja Pirilä (born in 1957) graduated in 1986 as a photographer from the University of Art and Design Helsinki (now Aalto University) and as a biologist (MPhil) from Helsinki University’s School of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. Pirilä’s works have been featured in private and group exhibitions across Finland, Europe, Asia, North America and South America since 1987, and she has authored three extensive retrospective exhibitions and books in 2014, 2024 and 2026. The trilingual CAMERA OBSCURA: light & darkness is Pirilä’s eighth and latest photography book.

For her work in developing and creative use of the rare camera obscura method, Pirilä has received the State Prize for Photographic Art (2000), the Pirkanmaa Art Prize (2010) and the Alfred Kordelin Prize (2020), among others. Her works are included in the collections of The Finnish Museum of Photography, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Serlachius Museums, Saastamoinen Foundation, Wihuri Foundation, Finnish State and Helsinki University Hospital.

The Marja Pirilä – Light and Darkness exhibition is on display on the 1st and 2nd floors of the Kimmo Pyykkö Art Museum 12.06.2027–09.01.2028.