Veera Rajamo: Wife - an ordinary great love story

Veera Rajamo’s exhibition Wife - an ordinary great love story focuses on love and everyday life. GalleriA presents Rajamo’s thirteen photographic works whose main character is her own wife.

Veera Rajamo has collected wedding dresses and dreamt of a wife; finding a wife and becoming a wife for someone. Now she is married and finds herself taking photos of her wife everyday. Rajamo captures small everyday moments, joy and the fragility of this new love. She wants to capture everything, remember everything. Rajamo wants to show this is how I see you. And at the same time she captures foreignness, how we can never know someone fully. In some way, we will always remain strangers to each other.

“We share this small apartment, in a small city and at the same time, we have different homelands, different native languages. Around the village we can see gay bashing graffiti. The homeland of my wife doesn’t recognize our marriage. But we are one and we are wives to each other. We share this feeling of belonging to nowhere and we meet each other there.”

Rajamo’s art practice combines both the private and the public sphere. In her previous works she has explored the themes of lgbt community, queer identity, loneliness and the longing for love. It feels important to her to capture ordinary life moments and queer joy. Rajamo wants to show the mundane and the special of this situation, challenges of immigration and support. She wants to do her best to help but she doesn't always know how. The photos fill the gaps when words fail.

Veera Rajamo (b. 1992, Kuopio) has graduated as an visual artist from Turku Art Academy and visual artisan from Pekka Halonen Academy. Her works have been exhibited in several group shows, including in Art Halls of Helsinki, Turku and Seinäjoki. Her art practice combines both the private and public spheres with elements of documentary and staged visual storytelling. Her aim is to see the world as beautiful and to find her place in it.