Teemu Mäki - Photography

TEEMU MÄKI – PHOTOGRAPHY
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HOW TO BE A WOMAN?

HOW TO BE A WOMAN? (2006–) is a photo series where I portray women of different ages, convictions and professions. I try to make visible the internal and external struggle women go through when they try to live with the culturally produced roles on offer for them.

I'm a male artist and because of this some would say that it's questionable or unreasonable that I try to approach these questions at all, but I hope my perspective is fruitful precisely because of this distance I'm endowed with.

ANATOMY OF MAN

A photo series in which I try to see men as they really are.

BE YOUR ENEMY

-workshop

In June 2003 I did a photography workshop, BE YOUR ENEMY, for children and teenagers in eastern Helsinki. It was funded and organized by KIASMA (Contemporary Art Museum) as a part of their subURB festival of urban culture. In the workshop I the task for each participant was to make a self-portrait in three photographs, in other words, a triptych. In the first photo one was to pose as one's idol. In the second photo one was just to be and reveal unpretentiously the mundane normal self. In the third photo one was to pose as one's enemy. I helped and guided and a team of three pros (a photographer, a make-up and wig specialist and a costumer) helped each participant to fulfill his/her visions. In the end I myself did the assignment too.

Over forty triptychs have been made in the Be Your Enemy workshops that I've conducted with art historian / curator Arja Elovirta since 2003.

Testing Your Ideals and Identity

RELATIVISM IS ABSOLUTELY TRUE

A work in progress (2000–). Photo-diptychs proving that everything is relative.

SELF-PORTRAIT

(In These Pictures the Artist Teemu Mäki Personifying the Divine Purposes of Life)

Photographs, texts, a mirror, 1995–1997, overall size 400 x 400 cm. On text panel on in the pile of photocopies: THE SACRED DISHWATER, which has been translated to Finnish, Russian, Bulgarian, German, Danish and Italian. The theme is another biblical task: "Name your essential roles – or modes of being – the ones you can't deny or escape. Learn to embrace them, to the extent that you can call them divine."

The pictures are titled:

Self-portrait as Bataille's eroticism.

Self-portrait as a culturally male. Weightlifter.

Self-portrait as a culturally female. Femme fatale.

Self-portrait as an artist. Photographing my dead grandmother (father's mother) on the day of her burial.

Self-portrait as you. The mirror.

Self-portrait as a procreator of life. Helping my wife to give birth to our daughter.

Self-portrait as a devourer of life. Meat my brother.

Self-portrait as a rational verbalizer. The Sacred Dishwater.

DEATH AT WORK

A multipartite work in progress since 1988, photographs, texts and a mirror.

An early overview of This Is My Family, a part of Death At Work, Museum of Photography, Helsinki, Finland, 1994, 165 x 1000 cm

Excerpts from This Is My Family and from other chapters of Death At Work. Click on the images to see the larger versions:

DEATH AT WORK is a multipartite work, not a series. I wrote about its construction principle in 1994:

"Most of my photos are multipartite works and consist not only of photos but also of texts. I have meant the texts and images to be of equal value. The texts are inside the works, they are not press releases, background info or introductions to the "actual" works, the pictures. Neither are the images illustrations of the texts, instead, the content of the work is meant to be built from the collision of images and texts.

Multipartite work is not a series, series being a very common concept in the tradition of photography. A series usually consists of a set of variations on a theme. Typical names of serieses in photography are titles like Irish landscapes, or Prostitutes of St. Petersburg. From a serial work you can pick an extract and it can stand on its own, even though it is thought that the full meaning of that extract only becomes visible when the whole series is shown. I have not made serial works at all, instead I have made multipartite works, that rely completely on the idea of montage, on the idea that a collision of pictures produce a meaning that can be far removed from the meaning that any isolated picture could have. That's why you can not show extracts from a multipartite work."

There are approximately 70 pictures in the whole work, at the moment. About 75% of the pictures in this work are black and white photographs, most of them 40 x 30 centimeters each (with passe-partout and frame 73,5 x 56,5 cm). They are printed on fiber-based Ilford Multigrade 1k photographic paper and treated with selenium toner for maximum archival quality. The color photographs are usually sized 73 x 56 centimeters each (with frame 73,5 x 56,5 cm). They are cibachrome prints. As the work is so large, it has never been exhibited in its entirety, even though it's meant to be an undivided whole. The compromise I've made has been exhibiting extensive "chapters" of it, the most frequently shown chapter has been This Is My Family.

CHRISTMAS NEVER COMES

A photo and a text. Occasionally exhibited with an audio CD of music, EIN TOD FOLGT DEM ANDERN, thus forming a triptych. The size of the photo and text panel is 40 x 30 cm (74 x 57 including the frame. My atheist/relativist version of the Ten Commandments of the New Testament. I only came up with nine anyway. This piece was central to my early work: its photo and/or text popped up again and again in various installations, performances, musics, videos and multidisciplinary pieces.

EIN TOD FOLGT DEM ANDERN
A piece of music by Teemu Mäki and Max Savikangas.
(6'30, included in the double CD: Max Savikangas – Extraterrestial, UUCD102, 2003)
The lyrics of the music are a modified version of Christmas Never Comes:

A death follows another death. Christmas never comes.
The presents have already been given. Everything you can own is inside your skull.
Know your enemy from your friends: You don't need any thing that you don't already have.
You are not dying of hunger, so how meaningful your life is to you depends, not on what you do but on what you think.
Consumerism's comfort doesn't make you come but says instead:
"Don't worry, be fatty, you're not ill, you just need a sleeping pill!"
Christmas is a celebration and promise of eternal life and happiness...
...but only mortality gives us the possibility to project personal purpose and meaning
onto our lives in a meaningless world. And to be alive is to be in pain.
Death at work = life.