The low sounds of wrenching and pounding are followed by a shrill shattering of glass. My body is still haunted by these powerful vibrating sounds, having been enwrapped by the soundscape of Sari Tervaniemi’s video Danger! (2008) for four weeks at Photographic Gallery Hippolyte in Helsinki, where I work. The video was a part of her installation, which included ten C-prints.

The scene for the lens-based work Danger! is a small private garage with a shining black car and a topless young woman. She is wearing fitted bleach-washed jeans and black high-heeled boots. The imagery brings to mind a peculiar cross between fashion photography and the kind of car advertisement that resorts to blatant sexual objectification.

In the C-prints, the woman is seen in the driver’s seat, though a half-open door. In one image she is battering the car’s steering wheel with a baseball bat in her hand, while in another she is without the bat and almost caressing the steering wheel. In other images, she is outside the car: delivering a high kick in the direction of the closed car doors; moving seductively close to the car; surrendering, kneeling and putting her head in front of the front wheel. Finally, the woman is seen standing outside the open garage door, empowered, with the baseball bat lifted and leaning on one shoulder.

These are the moments before the action is taken over by the short video loop. The woman challenges the car and the video ends with a forceful swing of the bat towards the front windshield. All you hear is the shrill sound of shattering glass. The violence of the final action is implied but not shown on film. The artist takes care to point out that violence in her work is always performed as a game of pretend, and not carried out in reality.

In view of Sari Tervaniemi’s earlier work, the smashing of the fetishized and sexualized car, loaded with symbolism, seems clearly also a symbolic breaking of the male order – as much as it can be interpreted to be a stance against increased private automobilization.

References to Media Imagery

Sari Tervaniemi is a visual artist who works with professional production teams in the fields of video and photography, often combining the two in installed exhibitions. She works with models and actors, young women and men. The scene is a contemporary Western city; the topics are socially engaged and carried out with a gendered attitude.

Both of her earlier short videos, The Vanishing Scheme (2003) and You Kill Me (2006) focus on tensions caused by stereotypical and media-portrayed gender images. In the earlier video, an independent woman fantasizes about her submissive role with a football player, boxer and fencer. The fetishized masculinity is brutal, violent, and insensitive.

You Kill Me carries on with the theme in the form of a modern love story about vampires. The dominant male is embodied by two suited champions of the laptop and mobile era. In the fictional setting, the men are blood-scavenging vampires, cold, without feeling, seeking merely their own interest. Eventually, the admiring and persistent woman is infected by the vampires’ deadly kiss and adopts a similar kind of behaviour and state of mind. A threatening mood hangs over the work, which is filmed in cool and cold tones of blue, and accompanied by a low, resonant soundscape.

All of Tervaniemi’s videos are accompanied by series of C-prints. The combination mimics the arrangement of films and promotional screenshots in cinema theatres. Both in photographs and videos, the artist works with an acute sense of the strategies of media imagery – which aestheticizes, objectifies and exploits people.

Disillusion in Urban Existence

Gender-sensitive issues are also at the core of Alpha Males (2007). The series of C-prints depicts men asserting themselves confidently in the kind of physical positions that are rarely taken by women in public space. The poster project Rape Park (2007) was included in a curated group action and highlighted the vulnerability of young women in one of the most violent parks in central Helsinki, which is notorious for incidents of sexual violence.

It is also tempting to see the demolished and glamorized cars in Crash (2009) as a metaphor for patriarchal structures – though, perhaps even more, the artist is here concerned with human lives, reckless driving, as well as the precarious developments of automobilized and technologized societies. In a parallel work, entitled Memento Mori (2009), Tervaniemi marks her position against the rising rate of accidents involving cars – those powerful man-made creatures, with blinding lights, the rulers of our city streets.

Certainly, Tervaniemi’s work opens up to several discussions. In particular, they seem to be permeated by a mood of melancholy and disillusion, reflecting the climate in our urban existences. The artist walks a tight line, balancing the intimate and personal with social engagement – aestheticization and exaggeration with irony.