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Demanding Faith
Erden Kosova
The images
in Placeless, a photographic series by Tea Mäkipää,
concentrate on the survival techniques employed by various non-privileged
segments of society. The photographs portray their struggle to subsist
in a highly competitive surrounding. The impoverished figures in
Mäkipää’s staged compositions are not related
to a non-European territory, to immigrant groups in European countries
or to some hypothetical “Other” asking for empathy. Rather,
the familiarity of these faces to a European audience is precisely
what makes them disturbing. The strategic and estranging fictionality
employed in Placeless, which tends towards the phantasmal, aims
at displacing the mythologies on, and revealing the emerging deficiencies
of, the societies relying on the welfare state system. Another work
by Mäkipää, the installation entitled 1:1, takes
up this harsh critique to comment on the dematerialisation of basic
social relations and the subsequent atomisation of society on the
whole.
Erden Kosova, an art critic, writer and
editor, is a PhD candidate at the Department of Theory of Visual
Culture at the Goldsmiths College, London.
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Atlantis
