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Marja Pirilä: Journeys to Light

4.7.–23.8.2026

Marja Pirilä
Journeys to Light
Art Exhibition 4.7. - 23.8.
Opening ceremony on Friday 3.7. from 17 to 19
Photographic Centre Nykyaika, Tampere

Just as my reality is porous and layered, constantly breathing in and out, the inner and the outer intertwine repeatedly in my works. In the words of Robert Bresson: “The real is something we make for ourselves. Everyone has their own. There is the real and there is our version of it.”

For this invited exhibition, I have brought together works from five different series created during my travels in Finland, France, and Japan. What unites them all is light.

The works in the street-level gallery are drawn from three camera obscura series. I began developing this rare photographic method as my artistic tool more than thirty years ago, and its simultaneously simple and magical nature continues to fascinate me. In a camera obscura, light rushes through a small opening into a darkened room, projecting inverted images of the outside world. As these projections merge with the interior, a kind of third reality emerges within everyday space—a liminal realm where the inner and the outer meet. It is this encounter that I expose in my photographs.

Milavida (2011–2013) was created in the silence of the abandoned Näsilinna Palace, now known as Museum Milavida. Photographing there felt like a meditation on light, and the projections carried by light seemed to awaken the palace from its melancholic emptiness. My work was influenced by the tragic fate of Peter and Olga von Nottbeck, who commissioned the building but died shortly before their new home was completed in the late nineteenth century. Alongside the camera obscura photographs, I collaborated with Iris Nuutinen on a collage series in which old family album photographs are combined with solargraphs recording the paths of the sun, which I captured from the palace roof. In these images, memories intertwine with the passage of time traced by sunlight.

Interior/Exterior (Sisätila/ulkotila, 1996–) is the oldest of my series. It originated from a desire to make visible the spaces people inhabit, both physical and mental. It resembles an extended family album that I have photographed across Finland as well as in Italy, France, Norway, and Japan. The series continues to grow.

In Strindberg’s Rooms (Strindbergin huoneissa, 2017) is my most experimental camera obscura series. I photographed it in France, at the Hôtel Chevillon artists’ residency—one of the birthplaces of photography—where I transformed a writers’ apartment into my laboratory of light and photography for six months. Throughout the residency, I was accompanied by an awareness of August Strindberg—the writer, painter, and pioneering photographer—who had worked in the same rooms in the 1880s. My camera obscura apartment became a kind of magic circle where the ordinary rules of everyday life receded and where darkness encouraged experimentation, play, and new ways of seeing the world.
The three-dimensional camera obscura works Encyclopedia (2012) and Mother’s Buckets (Äidin ämpärit, 2006) were created in collaboration with Petri Nuutinen. The soundscape for the exhibition has been composed by Tapani Rinne.

Downstairs, the video installation Light Notes (2025) belongs to my newest series, Light Diaries, which I have been developing alongside my slower camera obscura practice. On the screens of music stands arranged like a small orchestra, slowed-down minimalist videos flow past, combining reflections on the surface of water with notes on light from my sketchbooks. Light Notes is a small diary of light and presence—meditative moments that settle into everyday life, spaces to breath, and sources of happiness.

Photographic artist Marja Pirilä (b.1957) graduated in 1986, both as a photographer from the University of Art and Design Helsinki (now Aalto University) and as a biologist with an MSc in ecological zoology from the University of Helsinki.

Pirilä’s extensive body of work encompasses series made using the camera obscura technique. Her work and contributions to the development of this rare technology and its creative applications has won her awards including the Alfred Kordelin Prize in 2020 and the Finnish State Prize for Photographic Art in 2000. Since 1987, Pirilä’s works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Finland, Europe and Asia, as well as North and South America. In 2024, she was invited by the Finnish Art Society to hold a retrospective exhibition, Because of Light, at Kunsthalle Helsinki, and the same year she was invited to take part in the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s exhibition Remembrance beyond images.

Marja Pirilä has published seven photographic books, two of which are retrospective photography books: Because of Light (2024) and Carried by Light (2014). Her works feature in several collections, such as those of Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, The Finnish Museum of Photography , HUS Art Collection, Finnish State Art Commission, Serlachius Art Museum (Mänttä), Saastamoinen Foundation (Espoo) and the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation collection (Rovaniemi).