HANNA RÅST (FI), Nomads, 2022

Finnish artist Hanna Råst has been exploring for a long time the process of how we perceive time and what role our memory and photographic record of reality play in it. She is fascinated by working with the archive in the context of history, time, archeology, memory and identity. Her layered artwork examines the position of photography as part of displaying memories in the present that is oversaturated with visual materials. She consciously creates a false process of time effects, and thus initiates a pseudo-archive of visual memories. By exploring the medium of photography, she often goes from two-dimensional photography to tri-dimensional objects with obvious traces of the technical-historical legacy of analog photography. She thus asks herself: how do we observe the world and how do we remember it? Her series of works represent relief-like collages based on archival material from different eras. These documents, texts and images are in some sense like nomads, migrating across the boundaries, taking up residence in the media of one historical place and time and then moving to the next, tangling together and losing their original context. We must create new narratives and interpretations, maybe even identities and histories in a larger scale.