CINEMATIC SENSES

 

Cinematic Senses

Exhibition Laboratory, Helsinki
11 September – 18 October 2015

Artists: Henni Alftan, Anna Estarriola, Tiina Heiska, Saana Inari, Ivan Plusch, Tiina Pyykkinen, Tuomo Rainio, Salla Salin
Curatorial team: Anastasia Isakova, Mia Kivinen, Ville Laaksonen, Ulla-Maija Pitkänen, Maria Savela, Katariina Timonen

Project description:

Cinematic Senses challenged conventional notions of cinema as an art form primarily defined by sight and sound. The exhibition explored how cinematic experience — the temporal, immersive, and affective qualities of film — can manifest across other artistic media, particularly painting, installation, and performative environments.

The participating artists engaged with film not merely as a reference or subject, but as a mode of sensing and thinking. Their works suggested that cinematic perception is not limited to the moving image; it can also exist in static form, within the rhythm of color, surface, and gesture. The viewer’s gaze becomes mobile, scanning layers of image and meaning, while memory and imagination construct movement within stillness.

In this sense, Cinematic Senses positioned painting as an expanded screen — one that operates through visual residue, emotional tempo, and atmospheric suggestion rather than narrative sequence. The exhibition invited audiences to experience the cinematic not as projection, but as embodied perception, where time unfolds internally rather than on a literal screen.

A related performance event, NON STOP SENSE (3 October 2015), extended this investigation into the live and temporal domain, presenting performances that echoed the exhibition’s cinematic logic through gesture, repetition, and sound.

The curatorial approach foregrounded the idea that contemporary art continuously redefines its sensory vocabulary: cinema dissolves into painting, painting becomes performative, and perception itself turns cinematic. Cinematic Senses thus proposed that the true medium of film today may not be the camera — but the body, the image, and the act of seeing itself.

Photography: Petri Summanen