I am intrigued by Joonas Ahlava’s way of proposing thought. He doesn’t state, underline, provoke or intervene with his research-based processes. Instead, he stages his work for communication. Ahlava places great emphasis on means of action and presentation through disciplined, paradigmatic work. Central to Ahlava’s work is his aim to release subjective intentions of the artist and to disclose them for multiple, acceptable interpretations.

Ahlava is constantly developing his practice by challenging the limits of his own expression, experiences and interpretation. He attempts to find the parameters where photography transforms into something else. According to him these parameters are in continuous flux and can, therefore, be impossible to locate and define. With this search Ahlava aims to avoid reducing the image to its mere appearance and compels the viewer to rethink its possibilities and depiction. Ahlava combines a visual representation with the logic of the process of developing images and uses both of these as a means of expression. Questioning photography and visualizing its faults, however, is not enough for him. He aims to open the actual process, and not only its results, for interaction and communication.

Outer Limits is a portrait series that takes a look at the outer shapes, the outlines of our physical existence. Ahlava discusses the portraits through a personal, intuitive, almost primitive sense of who the person in the portrait is and has been for him. The portrait might present a former teacher, a lover, a tormentor, a person of strong personal significance. Accordingly, with this series Ahlava considers the history of portraiture and the traditions of photography. Taking the actual picture is only a part of the process that takes place in the darkroom, where he gives the portraits their colours, contrasts and shades and finally fills the images with connotations.

Through these personal associations, he discusses the way people are identified and categorized and what remains when the identifiable details are reduced to a minimum: to a feeling, interpretation, memory, impression. The coinciding presence and absence of the persons in the portraits is essentially embodied. For the viewer the portrait may mirror the memories and experiences he or she has while reading the images, trying to find shapes to relate to and to recognize. Ahlava suggests communication with the work and with oneself. The need to identify and to relate is a way to comprehend a situation. This is predominant for Ahlava. He sets his work as reflection for comprehending and interpreting our own identities. He reaches outside the matter of being in his place into meaning to imagine and recognize oneself.

Ahlava’s work arises from the limits of science and perception. As noted, he challenges the practice continuously in order to find new ways to confront and develop traditional photographic logic from ‘capturing the moment’ or ‘imitating reality’. For Ahlava Thought Patterns is a continuance to Outer Limits. With the series Ahlava moves on to explore thinking processes: how they develop, form patterns and routines and conduct our lives.

The content of the work varies from simple markings to complex chaos, thereby mirroring the conscious and subconscious levels, their parallels and overlappings. For Ahlava the repetition is the key. Ahlava sees this patterning as some sort of coding or reading, again as a suggestion of existing, universal unity yet opening the work for multiple, personal references.

I see these two series as a dialogue between the artist’s thought and endeavour. This is not a one-way process but conversational, both retrospective and forward-looking. Ahlava proceeded from discussing the personal relations through emotion, memory and intuition into considering how to visualize and represent thinking, reasoning, beliefs, opinions, judgement and evaluation. In both series Ahlava works with a level of abstraction, encoding universal patterns and forms reflecting on the possibilities of his own situation, potential and needs. Accordingly, he focuses on communication and dialogue and lets intuition lead him.

His work transforms from a meaning-loaded matter into an autonomous party contributing to the process of interpretative efforts. This interpretation of the thinking process, which in Heideggerian terms can be understood as being-in-the-world, I recognize as belonging to a vast universality and temporal complexity.