Ruska

When it comes to my artwork, the main topics I mostly work with are violence and autoetnography. Of course, it’s not always the case, but it is when I do more personal stuff.
My references are based on video art and films, with artists such as Bill Viola, Alan Berlirner, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Sadie Be...

When it comes to my artwork, the main topics I mostly work with are violence and autoetnography. Of course, it’s not always the case, but it is when I do more personal stuff.
My references are based on video art and films, with artists such as Bill Viola, Alan Berlirner, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Sadie Benning or Jonas Mekas.
But there’s also an essay that changes my mind the moment I just began to read: Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, in which she hypothesizes about humans’ fascination with violence in art, precisely war photography. She writes:

“[…] [T]here is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps
the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are
those who could do something to alleviate it—say, the surgeons at the military hospital
where the photograph was taken—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are
voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be. In each instance, the gruesome invites us to be
either spectators or cowards.”

That did take me a while to understand, but I did immediately when I figured out what I always did during the creation of a piece of art: the violence and the war I carried inside. And it was the one that made me create those things without even thinking about it.
However, I find that part of my studio photography is related to my personal artwork because of the looks I create. Those where the ones I grew up with and was critized for it.
But that’s the real question I try to find through my projects: why society shows no mercy to people who doesn’t reach the high standars that we mark?