Faces and Resurrections is a multi-art collaboration project between visual artist Antero Kahila and musician-poet Kirsi Poutanen. The exhibition consists of Antero Kahila’s paintings and Kirsi Poutanen’s two-channel sound work on the same theme, realized in the gallery space.

Antero Kahila is a respected and awarded visual artist and painter from Helsinki, who has become known for his figurative works dealing with alienation, outsiders and loneliness. Kahila’s works, who was also a Carnegie finalist candidate, have been acquired in the collections of Kiasma, Sara Hilden and the Saastamoinen foundation, among others. Kahila recently came to the attention of the general public worldwide with her unique, research-based reconstruction project of Caravaggio’s St. Matthew and the Angel. The research project continues to attract international interest.

“In my production in recent years, themes related to humanity and the human part and otherness have been repeated. I often find myself depicting faces, bodies, skin, clothes, films or fabrics in my paintings. The models of my main works that can be seen in the gallery have been unidentified clothes, ruffles and masses of clothes. In these paintings, the recurring clothing theme can be to be seen as a kind of metaphor for farewells, farewells and lost skin contact. The second theme of the exhibition is the face, parts of the face, and the small figures of children existing in the dark image space. The broken, disturbed, faded and difficult-to-perceive facial portraits are part of a series of anti-portraits that I started two years ago and named the Ritual series. I strive to represent humanity in my works , which is fragile, vulnerable and at the same time attuned to consciousness in a special way”.

Antero Kahila

Kirsi Poutanen is a multi-artist, well-known singer-musician and poet. He has worked as an actor/singer in professional theater productions, scripted music dramas and built sound works as part of numerous visual art projects. For the exhibition now on view, Poutanen has worked on his sound works by closely following the creation process of Antero Kahila’s paintings. The sound piece aims to reflect the themes of the paintings, resonating at the same time as an independent audio image in the exhibition space.

Kahila and Poutanen’s Faces and Resurrections exhibition project is a multi-interpretive and multi-sensory entity that can be viewed from, for example, the perspectives of insecurity, fear of disintegration and loneliness.

More Info:
anterokahila.com