The Things We Are Made Of: Elsa Salonen
Buni Buana (Hidden World)
Artist Elsa Salonen’s installation Buni Buana (Hidden World) exhibits colour samples from various natural elements distilled or ground onto a microscopic slide.
On each slide, the artist has painted images of nature spirits related to the animist worldview with transparent paint. These painted spirits become visible only through their shadows, revealing a hidden layer of nature’s reality.
Active agency of natural elements
Salonen collected various natural elements for the installation in Java, Indonesia: rocks, plants, soil, volcanic ash as well as seashells and pieces of dead corals. According to animism, every single plant, rock and tree is inhabited by an active agency, possibly even a spiritual consciousness, which has the right to live regardless of its instrumental utility to human needs.
In her work, Salonen has examined ancient Finnish nature religion, which she has compared to local animistic traditions together with local residents in Indonesia and Colombia. People have traditionally believed that nature spirits show themselves to their viewer in a form that the viewer can understand, which is why the figures revealed on the microscopic slides have been given a human-like form.
International exhibitions
Elsa Salonen (b. 1984, Turku) combines mysticism and science in her art. Her works, which are also inspired by animism and alchemy, lie somewhere between installation, painting and conceptual art. To realise the conceptual nature of each piece, Salonen prepares her own pigments from special natural materials – from meteorites to colours distilled from plants.
Salonen graduated from the Fine Arts Academy Of Bologna, Italy, in 2008. Over the past decade, she has been working mainly in Berlin. Salonen’s works have been exhibited worldwide, e.g. in Schwartzsche Villa and Kunstverein Wiesbaden in Germany, Viborg Kunsthal in Denmark, Miguel Urrutia Art Museum in Bogotá and Lissone Museum of Contemporary Art in Milan.
Photo: Ville Kaakinen, Museum Centre of Turku.
WAMx : The Things We Are Made Of
WAMx’s international expert in 2020 is Ece Pazarbaşı, a curator based in Berlin. She has designed the exhibition programme to align with the title The Things We Are Made Of. The programme shifts our focus from what divides us to what unites us: at the end of the day, we are all made of the same elements.