Video, film, and photography share the ability to capture and carry images with them; it is the gaze that renders these images tangible and brings an end to the presumed neutrality of the eye in relation to what it sees. Perhaps inherent to the practice of video art is the intention to question the conventional way of looking at moving images, beginning with its original sin of not being cinema. Nevertheless, it is customary to establish a form of dialogue with the seventh art, which, from being an older sister, may be teased into becoming a crying child or an elderly lady. This gentle polemic often stems from the artist’s passion for cinema, from which they borrow tools and methodologies, reshaping them at will in order to narrate things as they are invested with their own gaze.
SallaTykkä, “The Will”, 2025, installation view at Galleria Studio G7, Bologna, courtesy the Artist and Galleria Studio G7, ph. Francesco Rucci
The Will is the title of Finnish artist Salla Tykkä’s first solo exhibition in Italy, presented at Galleria Studio G7 in Bologna, as part of the annual Project Room programme. Curated by Marinella Paderni and on view until 31 January 2026, the exhibition focuses on the most recent developments in the artist’s filmic research, centering on The Will, the video work that gives the exhibition its title, installed in the gallery’s main room. In the same space, black panels display a number of still frames from another filmic work, evoking a dimension of domestic memory and a suspended time that seems never to resolve itself. Upstairs, a series of contact prints depicts bodies inscribed within shafts of interior light dominated by penumbra.
Salla Tykkä, “The Will (Testamentti)”, 2024, video, stereo, 27’43, courtesy the Artist and Galleria Studio G7
Shot at half-bust height and characterised by fluid, laconic camera movements, Salla Tykkä’s footage leads the viewer through a peripheral neighbourhood of Helsinki, where time appears to pass slowly among makeshift dwellings, warehouses, and piles of abandoned objects. Standing before the projection, in a state of reverent silence and contemplation, a doubt instinctively arises: who is looking? Why has this been brought to my attention? What is the artist’s gaze? These questions soon dissolve into the darkness surrounding the screen. From the light of this Nordic landscape – marked by the ruins of a once-promising industrial future – scenes of stillness and the ordinary unfolding of events emerge. The camera explores its surroundings, slips into interiors and wanders through outdoor courtyards where arrangements of construction materials, discarded tools, and urban waste take centre stage, releasing their charm as still lives and inanimate characters. Objects, however, are not the sole inhabitants of this landscape, which in fact constitutes the neighbourhood in which the artist’s studio is located.
Salla Tykkä, “Contact 1”, 2024, C-Print on dibond, 101,5×75,5 cm, courtesy the Artist and Galleria Studio G7, ph. Francesco Rucci
When asked why she decided to depict this specific context, Tykkä answers succinctly: «It is the place where I was born and raised, and yet I did not know much about it». With the disillusionment of being unable to extract a profound or elusive meaning from this question, it becomes natural to linger on the response, which inevitably points to the peculiar relationship artists have with the surroundings of their working environment. Typically, an artist’s studio is located on the outskirts of a city, due to costs and the lack of wide spaces in urban centres, and it often does not coincide with the area of residence, usually situated in neighbourhoods more convenient for daily life. Nor does it correspond to the geographical area where art is exhibited, customarily in galleries and institutions in city centres or, at times, in isolated exhibition spaces far off any established route, inviting visitors to undertake a kind of pilgrimage.
Salla Tykkä, “Torso I-VI”, 2014, series of contact prints on Ilford baryta paper, 24×18 cm (each), courtesy the Artist and Galleria Studio G7, ph. Francesco Rucci
The artist inevitably constructs a relationship with the surrounding environment, becoming a strange actor within it; they form a bond with the journey to reach it, with the neighbourhood, its signs, shops, and inhabitants, establishing a complementary relationship to the domestic and social sphere. In “The Will”, position and location coincide through the medium of video, which also recomposes the artist’s relationship with this place over time by juxtaposing images drawn from different moments of her life. In addition to Salla Tykkä, whose presence remains behind the camera, local residents discreetly populate the frames, silent even in the production of music and noise, such as a hard rock band on which the camera lingers more insistently.
SallaTykkä, “The Will”, 2025, installation view at Galleria Studio G7, Bologna, courtesy the Artist and Galleria Studio G7, ph. Francesco Rucci
The sequences described above are periodically interrupted by excerpts of archival footage taken from local news reports on the area’s industrial history, charting its transformation from housing for workers during the industrial boom to a degraded, spontaneous, and self-sufficient residential context in the wake of layoffs and company bankruptcies. Alongside this type of footage, the artist includes black-and-white photographs of her own making, as well as materials from her family archive, such as a frame from an 8 mm film shot by her paternal grandmother depicting her father and sister in 1972. The caption notes that this was her parents’ first apartment. Salla Tykkä’s “The Will” is certainly not a conventional testament, which often coincides with an ending and suggests a new beginning – whether harmonious or conflictual – through its legacy. Whether this video represents the artist’s poetic inheritance remains unstated, and while an artist’s final work is somehow overwhelming and sublime, it also carries with it the melancholy of disappearance. What appears here, instead, seems to live a life of its own, even without anyone to care for it, leading me to wonder whether it is those alleyways, those rooms, and those silences that ultimately conceive a person.
Info:
Salla Tykkä
Project Room #2 | The Will
curated by Marinella Paderni
09.01-31-01.2026
Galleria Studio G7
Via Val D’Aposa 4A, Bologna
www.galleriastudiog7.it
Born in Bologna, he studies fashion design and multimedia arts at the IUAV in Venice. He believes in the possibility of crossing boundaries between disciplines and that art can have an active role in breaking down inequalities and uniting people by creating communities.
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