Series: Ruskieloi solmiloi (Red Tangles)
31.1.–20.4.2025 / Masters of Photography 2025 - Image Being / Finnish Museum of Photography / Helsinki, FI
Ruskieloi solmiloi (Red Tangles) depicts a story through the heritage of a Karelian family, searching for visible and hidden fragments of Karelian culture that have unnoticeably persisted within daily life. In Tuomi’s works, their mother’s red hair, Karelian folk clothing they sewed themselves and textiles inherited from their evacuee grandmother become storytellers alongside photography. The domestic and personal materials weave the works into an archive of collective memory, intergenerational knots, and living Karelian heritage.
Built from everyday moments, the photographs decode and shift historical depictions of Karelian culture towards locality, highlighting the importance of community, home environments and craft in Karelian tradition. In their self-portraits, Tuomi is portrayed wandering landscapes inherited from their grandmother and working with their mother’s hair as a material. Alone and together with their mother, the scenes depict spinning, carding and winding hair into yarn. The performative photographs become places where the shifting shards of minority culture and identity take shape as moments lived and imagined together by three Karelian generations.
Naming the works in endangered Karelian language becomes a way to learn the language which has been used in Tuomi’s family line. In the presentation of the works, photography and Karelian craft tradition intersect, emphasising the multi-layered and narrative qualities of textiles and colours. Scrap fabric fringes and satin ribbons hang from the edges of wooden frames, drawing inspiration from the decorations of traditional Karelian textiles.