From Hailuoto to Punclut in Soemardja Gallery, Bandung, Indonesia, with Paula Lehtonen and Fajar Abadi, Henrycus, Maria Josephina, Meicy Sitorus, Michael Binuko, Herald Reynaldo, Agung Bezharie and Ahmad Nursalim.

The exhibition presented three aspects on landscape, in which what we see is not only an object under the gaze of a spectator, but also a way of thinking culture.

Works of the participants of the workshop "A Landscape Called Bandung"

Saara Maria Piispa: Domesticated Landscapes

My landscape paintings are similar to contemporary landscapes: pictures of industrialized society, unacknowledged cultural landscapes, where the land between cities is covered by concrete and asphalt so that people and products can be efficiently transported through areas that used to carry only life itself. These are landscapes of productivity, domestication and oblivion. From Hailuoto to Palm Springs.

The paintings displayed in Soemardja Gallery are inspired by experiences from places in which cultures more feral than western civilization have ceased to exist recently enough for us to still recognize traces of them. Landscapes as nature itself can be a sensitive indicator of human impact, and they can be easily built, destroyed or inadvertently modified. I am interested in how images of them can as well be used in order to produce impressions such as often repeated stereotype of Finland being the land of endless boreal forests. In my landscape paintings the railroad tracks run through valleys, sunsets fade into city smog and modern forestry areas are spotted with clear-cuts.