Emma Sarpaniemi: Honey Crunch

Emma Sarpaniemi’s solo exhibition is dominated by the photographer’s gaze. It guides the viewer throughout the exhibition, never letting go, creating tension between the camera, the photographer, and the audience. Sarpaniemi considers it important to recognize herself in every image, and the different characters portrayed in them offer a possibility to rebuild one’s self over and over again.

In feminist art, the self-portrait has been a symbol of women’s ability to portray themselves and their own world outside the masculine gaze. Sarpaniemi’s photographs portray femininity and corporeality as a space for playfulness and creativity. The direct gaze and cable release highlight the artist’s agency: Sarpaniemi determines what her portraits look like.

Solidarity, mutual support, and taking care of relationships within the working process have created an environment for agency that otherwise would have been impossible to achieve. Sarpaniemi’s photographs that include her close friends are not only self-portraits or pictures of friends, but something mutual and shared. In the moment the photograph is taken, the artist, together with her friends, defines femininity and ways of being in relation to another person.

At times her friends’ touch can be felt also in Sarpaniemi’s solo portraits: the painted house, the panties, and the wooden frames were made by Sarpaniem’s friends. Collectivity and the relationships between friends are present in Sarpaniemi’s photographs and her methods alike.

Honey Crunch is Emma Sarpaniemi’s first wider solo exhibition. It combines two of her long-running photography series. The first series, When the Sun goes down We see Lemons, consists of the artist’s self-portraits that she has been photographing together with her friends since 2019. The second series, Two Ways to Carry a Cauliflower, consists of solo portraits that invite the viewer to peek into the artist’s imagination where identity, reality, and fiction blend together.

Emma Sarpaniemi (b.1993) is a photographic artist based in Helsinki. In her work, Sarpaniemi explores the definitions of femininity through performative self-portraits. For Sarpaniemi, the self-portrait is a playground where the artist seeks to shake traditional conventions of femininity. She feels that transforming playfulness into an asset creates possibilities for new ways of being.

Sarpaniemi has received a BA in photography from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) The Hague in 2019. Her work has been exhibited in galleries, museums, and festivals in Finland and internationally, including Les Rencontres d’Arles, the European Month of Photography festival in Luxembourg, The Finnish Museum of Photography, Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Galerie Anita Beckers, and the Miettinen Collection. Sarpaniemi’s works are included in the collections of The Finnish Museum of Photography, HAM Helsinki Art Museum, Turku Art Museum, The Finnish State Art Deposit Collection, The Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation Collection, Museum Folkwang, Miettinen Collection, Heino Art Foundation, and private collections in Finland, Germany, The Netherlands, and Switzerland.