Exhibition: Ghost Archives

The city is composed of visible and invisible layers. On its streets, history, the present, and the future overlap on the same surface: posters are covered by other posters, and expensive loft apartments rise in place of former factories. And as one generation of engineering students disappears into suburban middle-class life, the next is already roaming and carousing in the bars of the city centre.

Oulu’s most well-known graffiti, “paska kaupunni,” is an example of a modern palimpsest—a surface that has been erased and rewritten so many times that the original can no longer be distinguished.

Ghost Archives examines the city as memory and as a living ruin, where its layers appear both as abstract painted surfaces and as tangible, embraceable remnants. The gaze sharpens toward the microbes of landfill sites on the urban periphery, monuments of a vanished world, and the mutilated phantom limbs of Google Street View’s algorithms.

From the cracks of rational planning and urban infrastructure, alternative possibilities emerge: found materials are given new life, and non-places turn into promises of adventure.

Artists in the exhibition: Ieva Balode, Saara Ekström, Toivo Heinimäki & Tommi Pasanen, Utu-Tuuli Jussila, Mikko Paakkonen, Hanna Råst.

Exhibition is displayed 4.–30.8.