Household | Poriginal, Pori Art Museum

Household is a group exhibition created by visual artists Paavo Kärki, Otso Prunnila, Aino Tillonen and Ossi Vuori for the Poriginal Gallery of the Pori Art Museum. The exhibition examines the wooden house as a repository of site-specific and intergenerational memories, both concretely and conceptually. Taking its initial impulse from an old post-war wooden house belonging to the Prunnila family in Pori, the exhibition considers the connection between memory and building, the surfaces of both, their privacy, and the shared experience associated with them. The works approach the subject through inner experience as well as by making use of documentary material, such as family photographs, audio recordings and wood. The painting in the exhibition has a particular relationship with its own medium. The paintings examine the relationship, difference and effect between their own surfaces and the surfaces of reality.

As they wear, materials create meanings for those observing them; decay creates symbols that give the viewer a reason to remember. Today, the relationship between Western people and their ancestors is increasingly distant. In an old building, however, one can experience the simultaneity of different times, and find a context for one’s existence. The structures of wooden buildings are first taken from living organisms (tree), after which, as the wood becomes fragile, it is exposed to being shaped by the ways of life of another living organism (the human). The experiences of ancestors can be seen in the grooves pressed into the wood, the traces they have caused and noticed themselves.

Memory always takes place in the present moment. What has been experienced and imagined reconstruct themselves anew. Memories are not formed solely through what has been personally experienced, but are also experienced on behalf of others, through associations, buildings and photographs. The artists’ works have emerged from the sum of what has been experienced, seen and read, much like memories themselves. As a concept, the rintamamiestalo (Finnish post-war wooden housing) is bound to the design of the mid-twentieth century, the tradition of wooden construction and state-controlled building in the post-war period. One of the underlying themes of the exhibition is therefore the question of whether the memories of a building are tinted by the structures of gender and family models connected to its original architectural functions.

When you enter the exhibition Household you do not enter the scenery of a memory. In the exhibition space, the works are always bound to their place. The body of work is conscious of its surroundings, and the exhibition also examines itself. It considers the boundary between collective and subjective remembering, and the public presentation of fragments of memories within the continuum of Western artistic traditions. The surfaces among which the lives of individuals have taken shape, with their secrets and whispers, have passed through the artist onto the walls and floor of the exhibition space, and into its sound.

-Niilo Korpihete

Paavo Kärki (b. 2001) is a visual artist from Espoo who works through painting and is currently completing his master’s studies at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of the Arts Helsinki.

Otso Prunnila (b. 2001) is a visual artist working with painting and writing. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, in 2025 and will begin his master’s studies at the Royal College of Art in London in the autumn.

Aino Tillonen (b. 2001) is a visual artist from Espoo working primarily with painting and is currently completing her master’s studies at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of the Arts Helsinki.

Ossi Vuori (b. 2001) is a visual artist from Helsinki whose practice makes use of moving image, sound and text. He is currently completing his bachelor’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of the Arts Helsinki.