Reviews and articles

Everyday Vrealities

Review  (...) At the same time, technology’s rapid progression means that practically anybody can pick up a keyboard and start coding – such as Timo Wright, whose game Virtual VRealities is pushing the boundaries of what can be done with VR.

Virtual VRealities is a documentary-style game where the player wanders in and out of other peoples’ houses, adding to the pantheon of indie games that Wright describes as “pushing the boundaries of what a game could be.”

“VR is still kind of developing, and there’s a lot of technical barriers… and the content, which is done for VR is quite specific. It’s usually just games,” he adds. “We tried to do something more serious or something more like a documentary film… we wanted to see what we [could] do in that field.” (...)

The Standard. 2023.

Fukushima - The Home That Once Was

Review  (...) In Timo Wright’s Fukushima - The Home That Once Was the audience is dropped alone into a village near Fukushima after the 2011 nuclear disaster. In the ruined village, trees are slowly beginning to defy the radiation between the buildings, and all around, the former residents stand and wait politely. If you approach them, they speak movingly about their great losses — but even more touching are the memories of everyday life before the disaster: the beautiful garden, the grocery shopping trips, and the extensive housecleaning routines that now seem meaningless.

A relatively primitive animation style enhances the surreal experience of standing in an uninhabitable town, and the residents’ distorted, half-dissolved bodies create the impression that the laws of nature are fiercely pulling them back from places they can no longer physically visit.

The work is experienced barefoot, completing the feeling that you are being invited into the real homes of real people. You are free to move around as you like. But the VR medium proves its immersive power when I find myself unable to leave — I have to stay and hear the entire story of how one resident used to buy onions. It would simply feel rude to leave halfway through. (...)

Filmmagasinet Ekko. 2022.

Solace

Review  It seems that writing about exhibitions by people you know is not considered proper etiquette. So technically, I shouldn’t be writing about Solace, Timo Wright’s exhibition currently on view at Forum Box. And of course, it would feel disingenuous to praise the work just because the artist is a nice person. On the other hand, it would also feel unpleasant to write negatively about it for that same reason. And yet, it would be truly annoying not to write about an exhibition that genuinely moved me — especially when it did so despite my own expectations. And that’s exactly what happened with Solace, and of course it’s that very experience I want to write about.

I’m heading to the opening of Timo Wright’s Solace at Forum Box with a friend, tired and unenthusiastic, and I think to myself that it’s actually a relief I don’t need to — and in a way can’t — write about the work, since my expectations are low. A video or experimental documentary of people crying sounds mostly awkward. It brings to mind advertising videos that show people in emotional states, the kind that are “touching” enough to get shared on social media with teary captions. I also think of reality shows like Vain elämää, where the moments when an artist cries are the emotional “money shots.” “They’re just human, they’re so sensitive!” viewers sigh from their couches, while the long dinner table in Hirvensalmi is sticky with feelings as the musicians open up, moved by each other’s survival stories or their own capacity for empathy.

When I finally step into the back part of the gallery, darkened with curtains, the video has just ended. By lucky chance, I’m able to watch it from the beginning and even sit comfortably on a couch, beer can from a sponsor in hand. The first thing I notice is the careful installation of the work and the excellent image quality — something I had expected. Only after that do I focus on the rotating cast of unfamiliar people in front of me. I watch their faces, their expressions, their gestures. Very soon, I’m surprised by how absorbing it is to simply watch them. Those solemn expressions. Eyes filling with tears. Faces contorting, eyes squeezed shut, lips flattening as mouths open wide. I hadn’t expected this. How present they are. How bare they are. How they let the sorrow in.

The tears run down their cheeks — sometimes quickly, barely brushing the face, or as if digging a deep hollow and then faltering halfway. Their bodies collapse inward, shoulders rise to ears, hands reach helplessly to their faces or to their chests as if for comfort. Grief rises, swells, and crashes.

Then it subsides, only to rise again. I recognize that peak of sorrow and its rhythm when I watch one woman’s sides heave for air, in a moment where she seems to be slowly drowning in her own distress. Sitting on the couch, meters away from the screen where the video is projected, I feel the sorrow of these strangers. I sense its weight. They offer it to me bare, made small in their sadness — like a gift I hold in my hands and examine. It is heavy, but a beautiful gift.

EDIT. 2019.

Solace

Review  (...) At the entrance to TIMO WRIGHT’s (b. 1977) video work Solace (2017), tissues are provided. The concept of the piece is deceptively simple: a group of people cry in front of the camera. No explanations, no stories — only tears. Even without a personal reason to cry, something clenches in the pit of your stomach, and the emotion starts to spread. In the safety of the gallery, the sorrow feels somehow comforting — even cleansing. (...)

Helsingin Sanomat. 2019.

Solace

Review  (...) The film consists of elevated, slow-motion black-and-white shots showing individuals in different stages of crying, and I personally had a strong sense of witnessing either the end of a chain of events or some existential interlude. The silence of the empty, black background heightened this impression. It’s easy to respond to a crying person with sympathy, assuming something has happened to them. While watching the film (and digesting its somewhat seriously-cheesy aesthetic), I started to consider that behind one or more of these crying episodes there might actually be a horrifying personal choice or act — something that would appall me if I knew about it. Or that the reason for the tears might be something utterly trivial and superficial. (...)

Solace examines crying in a documentary manner through a series of changing faces. The idea that the reason for the tears could just as well be something appalling is a very valid point. The work indeed addresses crying on a completely general, fundamental level, and it feels as though all its aesthetic and cultural meanings have been deliberately set aside (even though the crying itself is clearly aestheticized).

Personally, I’m more interested in crying as a social performance — as it appears in reality shows, for example, where it serves as a guarantee of authenticity and a means of persuasion. I don’t mean to suggest that the tears shed in reality TV are therefore fake, but it’s obvious that tears are wanted, and it’s precisely that desire that fascinates me. (...)

Seiskan Pojat. 2019.

Solace

Review  Timo Wright’s Solace, a 13-minute single-channel video of various people crying, might be the most throwback work in the Currents New Media Festival. Nothing is groundbreaking about this black-and-white, slow-motion depiction of the stages of several individuals’ cloudbursts, set to an elegant composition for cello, harp, and organ. Andy Warhol filmed subjects working up tears in his mid-’60s Screen Tests; more recently, performance artist Marina Abramovic and video artist Bill Viola have meaningfully explored emotional pain as a fundamental human experience. Nonetheless, Solace will stir — perhaps even shake — certain viewers.

 As we navigate Instagram stories and Facebook feeds — in which our friends become their own PR flacks, curating a public show of their personal lives — it’s easy to forget the depths and complexities of others’ private selves. Wright’s film makes us contemplate the suffering each of us endures as we hurtle through a life cycle, as well as the highly individual ways in which we process sorrow. 

The film has three movements. In the first section, we watch subjects give in to their anguish, relinquishing control over their emotions. Many of them seem to share a certain veil over their eyes — their gazes are downcast, obscured by faraway expressions, their thoughts traveling to distant places within. Breathing speeds and slows. Mouths open and twist. Brows develop fissures.

A proliferation occurs in the second part of the film, as the crying jags climax. We are given the time and space to examine a face at a time, wondering at the causes of each person’s pain. Some look angry at the slippage of their masks; a few seem resigned. We begin to wonder about older grief — perhaps marked by those who are more at peace with sobbing on camera — versus fleeting or more situational sadness. We obsessively track single tears — one traveling at a snail’s pace, a tiny slippery jewel running down a woman’s jaw. The subjects are shot from the sternum up, which allows for a close study of their clothing. Logos, embroidery, and prints look absurd in juxtaposition with the naked emotion of their wearers.

And then, the storm subsides. Hands are rubbed over faces; expressions begin to normalize. Some stare into the camera defiantly, newly aware of what it has captured. The clouded gaze becomes clarion. We begin to ponder the nature of resilience. The title is important. Each person has burrowed deep within, finding a hollow in which to purge for a few minutes. The effect — for the viewer who has made enough emotional room to give in to a 13-minute study of other people’s pain — recalls that ancient term of dramatic art: catharsis.

Santa Fe New Mexican. 2018.

A Feast With King Midas

Review  (...) The key work of the exhibition can be considered Timo Wright’s short film, a few minutes in length, in which an expressionless man sits at a dining table.

Numerous delicacies spoil — rotting, drying out, and molding into a disgusting mess. Western food culture, like other commodities today, has become a culture of consumption. (...)

Helsingin Sanomat. 2014.

Nemesis

Review  I don’t recall a work of art ever driving me out of a gallery before. Well, now one has.

Half a million dead bees are rotting in the gallery space at Kaapelitehdas. The stench is so strong it’s hard to breathe. Nemesis, an installation by Timo Wright (b. 1977), is not art made to please. Quite the opposite.

Wright has previously explored decay as a subject in his art. His video work A Feast with King Midas (2013), exhibited at Helsinki Art Museum last year, was a modern take on the vanitas theme, where a slowly rotting banquet served as a reminder of human pride and blindness in the face of dwindling natural resources. 

The same theme recurs in Nemesis, but in a far more visceral way. The piece refers to the phenomenon known as "colony collapse disorder", in which worker bees die off en masse, causing serious problems for agriculture. The phenomenon is believed to be a consequence of human environmental impact.

The dead bees in the piece serve as a warning: humanity’s blind consumerism will come back to haunt us.

This is what critical art can be at its best. Wright’s work doesn’t remain an abstract statement — it scorches its message into your nasal membranes. The piece is at once elegant and revolting. The message hits harder when it turns not just your thoughts, but also your stomach.

Helsingin Sanomat. 2014.

Self-Portrait

Review  (...) A few years ago, artist Timo Wright photographed every single one of the more than 3,000 items in his home: clothes, vinyl records, cutlery, plastic toy soldiers, extension cords . . . The photos were turned into an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Helsinki, through which the artist wanted to challenge our tendency to accumulate absurd amounts of stuff around us. Now, the same images loop in a continuous strip along the walls of the Design Museum — from the upstairs exhibition rooms all the way down to the basement restrooms. (...)

Helsingin Sanomat. 2012.

A Feast with King Midas

Article  Artist Timo Wright lifts a plastic curtain and cracks open a door in an old industrial building. A pungent stench wafts out. Wright puts on a respirator.

In a back room of the hall stands a lavish banquet table, covered with a white tablecloth. Oysters, salmon, poultry, grapes, red wine, a generous wedge of Italian cheese.

But something’s not quite right.

The salmon skin is puckered like once-crumpled foil. A dead fly floats on the surface of the wine, green belly turned upward. Soft white mold is growing on the surface of blackened figs.

Actually, it’s rather beautiful. The mold looks like some kind of underwater vegetation.

“Not much is visible yet,” Timo Wright says thoughtfully. “But once the flies start laying eggs inside the food, things will start happening.”

The banquet table is Wright’s art project called A Feast with King Midas. The meal has now been laid out for a week; there’s still a month to go.

Seven cameras are poined at the food, taking one photo every 45 minutes. Wright will compile these images into a video where the decay process is accelerated into about four minutes.

There’s also a single plate set at the table. In the video, a man sits before it, staring blankly into the camera without touching the food.

He is King Midas — the mythical figure from antiquity who wished that everything he touched would turn to gold. At the same time, he represents one of us — the Western squanderers for whom nothing is ever enough. We’ve become blind to everything we already have — including what’s in our refrigerators.

“In Finland, a shocking amount of food is thrown away. From the fields to our plates, 65 percent of food ends up as waste,” Wright says.

“On top of that, each Finn throws away about 25 kilos of food at home every year. Often it’s because people get bored with a food and don’t want to eat the same thing two days in a row. Also, not everyone realizes that food can still be edible even after the ‘best before’ date."

Midas’s meal probably isn’t edible anymore. “Well, maybe you could still get something out of the bread,” Wright muses. “It’s just dried out.”

The more poetic meaning of the work is mortality and impermanence. Wright has been inspired by Vanitas paintings — symbolic still lifes from Dutch classical art, featuring things like skulls and wilted flowers.

“They say that since we’re going to die soon, let’s enjoy this day,” Wright says.

The time-lapse decay video created from the photo series visually represents the passage of time. “Even though the work is a statement, it’s not just preaching — it’s also meant to be engaging for the viewer. I expect that once the fly larvae start eating into the food from the inside, it will slowly collapse and turn into a black mush.” (...)

Ylioppilaslehti. 2012.

Race Code

Review  (...) When a viewer steps into the Helsinki Art Museum's Kluuvi Gallery, they see a long wall filled with projected portraits. The exhibition visitor can, if they wish, join the lineup: by sitting in front of the camera’s eye, they allow their face to be captured and added to the cavalcade of faces on the wall. But only after a strict analysis. A computer program analyzes facial features to determine whether the photographed person belongs to a “lower” or “higher” race and places the image among the other 96 accordingly. (...)

Helsingin Sanomat. 2012.

Race Code & A Long Journey Home

Review  At the opening event, a queue begins to form. Exhibition visitors wait for their turn, their access to be photographed for Timo Wright’s work The Race Code. There is giggling and a buzz of questions. One must stay seated for a few seconds so that the mechanical pupil has time to recognize and classify, to calculate the right place for each person. Infants on laps can’t keep their gaze fixed forward long enough, but with the help of their parents, the process is managed.

Despite the laughter, the theme of the work is serious. (Or can we even talk about a “theme” when the audience is this involved in the piece?) It’s about classification through facial features. Numbers flash over our faces on the screen, ratios of features, criteria, interventions of power. The title of the piece refers to sorting based on racial characteristics. The photos taken of visitors are placed into some sort of ranking system. However, the resulting grid of passport photos ultimately reflects the richness of difference. As humans, we cannot directly see how the machine classifies us. Power remains hidden. The all-seeing eye is concealed. The question of what one should look like to be placed higher up lingers in the air.

Countless faces stare back at the viewer in a photo collage projected on the wall. At times, the images blend as they make space for a new person to be classified. It is indeed about persons, in the Latin sense of persona, masks — but no longer personalities, no longer individuals. Classification robs us of uniqueness. In passport photos, the face is no longer a trace of the infinite, a bottomless ethical challenge as philosopher Emmanuel Levinas once described. Instead, each person is cataloged, othered, alienated into nothing more than a categorized object — a subject of control.

Still, a queue forms — a queue at the service window of bureaucratic self-surveillance, a queue for the storage room of commodified identities, a queue for the spotlight of publicity.

Participating in the work also means leaving a trace of oneself. My face, or whatever causally gets recorded from it, remains in the exhibition for others to view. I become faceless under the community’s gaze. I do, of course, belong partly to that same community — to the row of images of exhibition visitors — just as I do when I sign the exhibition guestbook. According to philosopher Jacques Derrida, writing is a trace: postponed into the future, thrown forward, a challenge addressed to others that always includes the endless movement of meanings, the radical absence of any final meaning. By participating in Timo Wright’s piece, one can also exercise liberating power — even if within regulated limits. One can demonstrate that the criteria for grouping, one’s place in society, is always open, yet to be determined — a richness of participatory life. Many at the opening do exactly this, exercising their freedom by making faces at the camera, perhaps at first just to see how the machine manages to classify a face that grins atypically.

My face logs into the system. It remains after me in Wright’s face book. The image shows me — the one who stayed behind, who neither meets the gaze nor responds when asked — is already dead.

Wright’s work is not without art historical references. The collection of images forms a kind of Last Judgment. One is also reminded of Coptic death portraits, which preceded modern portraiture, which in turn preceded passport photos. At one time, the Surrealists played with collective artworks like the exquisite corpse, and already village churches radiated around themselves a communal grid — a row of final resting places. Death does not ask about race, but that is precisely why collective power uses it: unblessed land, expulsions, lynchings, war.

Timo Wright’s exhibition If You Tolerate This… includes another installation, The Long Journey Home. In the smaller room of the gallery, CD players, mini stereos, and ghetto blasters are placed on pedestals in a semicircle. After walking through the room for a while, one notices motion sensors: each player begins to amplify its sound as someone approaches. In each device, a person tells, in their own way, about a life story marked by displacement and refuge.

The Long Journey Home seeks to remind us that refugees are among us — and have always been. We are all descendants of refugees.

In fact, the work digs deeper into us than mere reminding or storytelling. One has to lean in toward the audio devices for the sound to become audible. Each must be approached individually — as an individual. They are arranged in a semicircle, like a therapeutic conversation group processing trauma. The work invades our movement, our embodied existence, our footsteps, our ears, the walls around us. If you listen carefully, you can hear its echo outside the gallery space too. In the everyday city street, you can still hear the echoes of the exiles and stories we are made of.

I approach my fellow human beings. My body echoes in the circle of speakers. My knees carry the legacy of generations. The recycled audio players recycle the refugee experience in my blood. I am in the arc of life, in flight, at home in homelessness. I am in the middle of a conversation, unfinished but among others.

The works contrast with one another in an intriguing way. I actively participate in the photo collage with my face, but I passively listen to the speakers. Yet the effect is reversed: the face grid pacifies; the quiet listening activates. With photographs, one can quickly classify, categorize, typecast, subject to power, monitor, and even punish. An intimate narrative voice, on the other hand, leads us to truly encounter a human being, to turn an ear toward them, to linger in silence — precisely because the voice comes from a faceless speaker. In one piece, the space is sterile, dominated by the superficiality of appearance. In the other, the inner voice’s unique life story takes over the room and our physical presence. The contrast makes both works more powerful.

“…then your children will be next.” By quoting the famous song lyrics, Wright asks: how far are we willing to yield to othering, power-seeking ways of thinking? The Race Code presents a dystopian vision of the future, while The Long Journey Home reminds us of where we came from. We exist in between — and as intermediaries. But do we care about one another?

Kultturilehti Mustekala. 2012.

Race Code & A Long Journey Home

Review  “One night, someone knocked on the door at midnight and said the last train leaves at two. You can only take what you can carry in your hands.”

This is how one of the stories begins in Timo Wright’s artwork A Long Journey Home. In this audio installation composed of radio devices, eight people — including today’s refugees, Finnish war children, and Karelian evacuees — share their experiences. The stories are narrated by actor Vesa Vierikko, with place names and dates removed. This emphasizes how similar the feelings are for those forced to leave their homes — across different parts of the world, in different eras and situations.

“There were certain things that kept recurring in the interviews,” Wright explains. “For example, the fear that when you turn to look at your home for the last time, you don’t know if you’ll ever see it again. One interesting unifying factor was pets. Many people felt deep sorrow about leaving behind their animals without knowing how they would survive.”

In addition to the audio piece, Wright’s exhibition includes a computer installation titled The Race Code, which illustrates the injustice of classifying people. The program takes a photo of the viewer and calculates, based on facial features, where they rank in an artificial racial hierarchy. The portrait is then projected onto the wall alongside previous visitors’ faces, placed according to the generated ranking.

“The idea is that the viewer tries out the program, thinks about what it’s based on — and hopefully realizes it’s based on nothing,” Wright explains. “Because there is no valid way to sort people into any kind of order.”

The audio installation and computer piece are both on display in Timo Wright’s If You Tolerate This… exhibition at the Helsinki Art Museum's Kluuvi Gallery. (...)

Kansan Uutiset. 2012.

Our Memories are Tomorrow

Review  A seasoned culture journalist gets emotional. The artwork swims against the current. I fear becoming numb to images. There’s no escaping the flood of pictures. As an art critic, it’s my job to look at images. I’m supposed to approach each one with fresh eyes.

I don’t want to become cynical. I hope I can continue to be delighted by images for decades to come. Vacation photos from friends, advertisements, documentaries, and artworks all deserve a chance to be viewed without a negative preconception.

Sometimes the image flood is too much. The Young Artists 2009 exhibition at Kunsthalle Helsinki was such an overwhelming experience. Many isolated images without any continuity left me both confused and slightly jaded. In this context, I experienced Timo Wright’s (b. 1977) media artwork — one that destroys images — very powerfully.

I interpreted it as an internal critique of visual art itself, exhibited in just the right place. The work is compelling in many ways. It elegantly swims against the current of Finland’s video art–heavy media art scene. It is raw without being cynical, and at the same time impossibly poetic. The disappearance of images and memories always also involves the fading of stories.

In the piece, images are slowly destroyed before the viewer’s eyes. They dissolve into pixels, gradually losing all representational quality. The final image is destroyed at the close of the exhibition. The physical installation of the piece is aesthetically very successful. The artist’s touch is as visible in it as brushstrokes are in a painting.

Even though the work destroys images, it is an image in itself. Thanks to its rich content, its visuality has a cleansing effect.

Helsingin Sanomat. December 2009.