KANA KAWANISHI PHOTOGRAPHY is pleased to announce the opening of Maija Tammi Solo Exhibition,White Rabbit Fever, on Friday, August 4th, 2017. This exhibition commemorates the release of Tammi’s monograph White Rabbit Fever, published by Bromide Publishing House Ltd. (Hardcover, 200 pages, bilingual: Japanese/English.)

 

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Maija Tammi, born 1985, is a Finnish artist who is currently working on her studio art-based doctoral thesis at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki. She also regularly collaborates with scientists and musicians. Tammi’s works are themed on primordial perceptions of our world, such as life and death, disgust and fascination, aesthetics and beauty, perception of time, and moral values—expressed in the medium of photography, video and installations.

 

In her White Rabbit Fever series, Tammi documents a rabbit corpse lying in a forest and gradually decaying over 100 days, and questions the ambiguous borderline between life and death, beauty and abhorrence, and disgust and fascination.

 

—What things are we allowed to consider ‘beautiful’? Why not all life?

 

Deliberately challenging the conception of beauty, she focuses the viewer’s attention on a deceased subject, which is typically considered an element of abhorrence. However, the dead rabbit is portrayed to be illusory and romantic—as though in a fairly-tale—illustrating the beautiful aspects of how every particle of the rabbit corpse returns back to the nature. The body of work consequently raises basic questions to the viewer: Until which point is it a rabbit? From what point does it cease to exist?

 

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In addition to the rabbits, Tammi presents individual images and sequences of human cell lines that grow indefinitely; cancer cell lines that are kept alive in laboratories around the world.

These cells, unlike most human cells, can divide eternally (*), provided the nutrients and the living space. In one example, an American woman named Henrietta Lacks died in 1951, but her cells are still alive and continuously grown. Her cells—named HeLa cells—were also the first human cells in space. Tammi has also documented Pa-Ju cell line, which originates from Finnish teenage patient who died in 1983, and Us-Ki cell line derived from a Finnish patient in 2009. Tammi has been growing and documenting the cell lines under controlled conditions at a research laboratory in Helsinki, Finland.