Tuomas Ollikainen / Sculptor

Kitchen Stories

Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote, in his memoirs about the life in the Soviet Union in the 30's, that the kitchen was the only place where one could speak freely. These four sculptures made of ceramics, wood and soap stone were exhibited in Petrozavodsk in September 2018. The ceramic parts of the pieces also present the most common colours of houses, which I have seen in Russia, just across the Finnish border.

2018

Antimonument

Antimonument is a small sculpture of bronze and stone. It is installed to Rajatalo, which is an art project created around an abandoned house in Keuruu, Finland. Traditional monuments create around them an aura of 360 degrees, usually of a personified power. Also Antimonument, erected at the edge of a forest, creates its own aura, but of a different kind. Here is an interview in Finnish about the work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9MJPEDLCRw

Olohuone

Olohuone in English translates as "living-room", yet more accurate rendering would be "being-room". The installation was made for the 20th anniversary exhibition of the Art Center Ahjo in Joensuu in April 2018. The theme for the exhibition was "Art Under Construction", and the keywords of the installation were: fermentation, intoxication, simulation, transgression, recreation and incarnation.

2017

Möhkönvirta 2017

Möhkönvirta-contemporary art exhibtion was the big project of the 2017. Besides being an artist in the exhibition, I was also one of the curators and also responsible for the graphic design of all the promotional material. While making the serie of works for the exhibition I was reading a lot of Polish poetry from the periods before and after World War II. As a result, the works have a catastrophic undercurrent in them.

Post Mortem

Post Mortem was a solo exhibition held in Galleria Kohina in Joensuu (November 2017). The exhibition took a point of view from the future to the present. At the core of the works was the question: How can climate change effect our understanding of crime and law? I wanted to approach the question through dichotomies of individual and common good, security and power, knowledge and information.

Back to the Future

Placed in the window of the Ikkunagalleria in Joensuu for the last two months of the year, the exhibition Back to the Future presented small wooden sculptures made during six days at the Mustarinda house in the summer of 2017. Also five photos were included, taken with an old Zeiss Ikonta camera, at the Paljakka Nature Reserve in October 2017.

2016

Hagioscope

Group exhibition with artists Sami Ala and Pirta Ala in September 2016 at Taidekeskus Ahjo, Joensuu. Common theme for the exhibition was sacred. The name of my serie of works was Epistemological Cycles.

Seven Invisible Men

Solo exhibition Seven Invisible Men was held in Gallery Taidebunkkeri in May 2016. The main theme of the exhibition was encounter. The gallery is situated right next to a refugee center, where people arrive from Syyria, Afghanistan, Iraq etc. Within the gallery space, raw wood met with concrete, waters from different sources were mixed together, and other encounters occured.

Pohjolan suuri sauna

Installation made for Löyly on Henki group exhibition at Louhitalo, Eno in the summer of 2016. The work took its clue from Kalevala, in which the ancient Pohjola is depicted as a notorious northern land ruled by infamous Pohjolan Akka. The installation proposed a more positive and ambigious view on Pohjola.