Exhibitions

Father’s Land

Date

01.08.2023–

31.08.2023

Photographer Teija Soini has photographed her father, her father’s childhood home and her own favourite views for an exhibition named Father’s Land at the Tyrnävä Library. In the series, the artist reflects on how childhood landscapes and the place where we are born and where we spend the first years of our lives in stay with us. The photos in the exhibition were taken in Tupos and its surroundings near Oulu in 2022 and 2023. The flat, low fields of Tupos are former seabed, and an area where the landscape changes constantly. The open fields of the artist’s childhood memories are now covered by birch trees and many of the buildings have been demolished, but the spirit of the place remains and can still be felt.

Teija Soini has lived in many countries and has travelled extensively around the world – yet she has always carried with her a sense of the low-lying fields, and they have remained part of her inner landscape. The exhibition at Tyrnävä Library shows 18 works, most of which were shot on film. The exhibition is part of Teija Soini’s larger, long-term photography project that explores the essence of the low lands of the region and human attachment to place and landscape.

Teija Soini
Father’s Land
Tyrnävä Library, Meijerikatu 3, Tyrnävä
1–31 August 2023
Opening: 8 August at 6 pm

Open
Monday to Friday noon to 7 pm
Thursdays 9 am to 4 pm
Fridays noon to 4 pm
Saturdays 11 am to 2 pm

Additional Information

Teija Soini

Teija Soini (born 1967) is a photographer living and working in Oulu. She was inspired by photography in the 1990s while living in Texas. She has studied photography at North Lake College, Dallas, shooting documentary photographs of life in Texas and the USA. She continued photographing actively in the early 2000s during five years spent in Tuscany, Italy. In 2007, Soini returned to Finland and found her own place near Oulu. She has a degree in photography in Finland and works as a freelance photographer for several Finnish magazines, companies and newspapers. Her photographs are inspired by northern nature, people and phenomena, and her photographic projects often explore nature and human connection with nature. In 2020, she produced a photo book named N65°37′32″E27°36′16″, which tells the story of an unidentified light phenomena seen in the Syöte area near Pudasjärvi: the people of the area, their relationship with nature, and the supernatural encounters they witnessed. The book was published by the prestigious Raw View Editions. Photos from the series have also been displayed in several exhibitions. In 2021, Soini produced a set of photographs for writer Jenni Räinä’s Kulkijat, a novel about women in nature.