BERLIN.- Persons Projects opened its summer exhibition, The Art of Renewal, bringing together works by the three Helsinki School artists Nanna Hänninen, Ilkka Halso, and Sandra Kantanen—whose conceptual approach to their photographic based practices has engaged deeply with ecological concerns over the past two decades. Through their unique interventions, each artist seeks to symbolically restore nature to what has been lost due to climate change, human neglect and urban encroachment. By altering images of real landscapes, they draw attention to pressing environmental issues, both present and future, blurring the line between the real and the imaginary. Their works use paradoxical situations to emphasize the reality of ecological degradation – barren landscapes infused with color, nature artificially preserved within protective structures, and untamed urban meadows transformed into surreal landscapes.


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Nanna Hänninen focuses on environmental issues affecting global communities, specifically on global warming. In her Painted Desert series, she travels throughout the world choosing locations most affected by drought. The works selected for the exhibition are from the artist's studies through Joshua Tree National Park, Monument Valley and Saguaro National Park in Arizona. Through her documentation of these natural surroundings, she reflects on our relationship with landscape and nature. Her process begins with black-and-white photographs that vividly capture the stark impacts of climate change on desert landscapes. By staining the prints and intervening with paint, she transforms the original images, creating a deeply personal response to a collective reality. Her painterly interventions breathe life and color back into the drought-stricken deserts. Her photographs reflect the fragility these endangered environments face as the human presence encroaches upon them.


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In his series Museum of Nature (2000), Ilkka Halso creates a variety of images that explore ambiguous dystopic futures, in which nature has vanished due to the reckless exploitations of humanity. These works seek to raise awareness for the irreversible environmental changes that derive from our own actions. The playfulness of the sceneries, such as in Rollercoaster (2004) or Theatre I (2003), hits the viewer with its ironic undertone. Depleted nature appears either as a precious legacy that needs to be put under strict supervision and kept alive at all costs, or as being used purely for entertainment purposes. Critical, yet prophetic, the images remind us of early science-fiction, in which nature does not exist anymore. Combining landscape photographs with computer-generated 3D models, Halso uses digital processes to create scenes that convey a pessimistic, highly artificial atmosphere, revealing nature to be a limited resource that can be exploited to the point of no return.

Drawing inspiration from Chinese landscape painting, Sandra Kantanen creates idealized, surreal sceneries, that can best be described as "mindscapes.” Upon discovering that many of the sacred mountains depicted in traditional Chinese paintings had been devastated by pollution and tourism, she embarked on an aesthetic journey to challenge the notion of what a culture believes to be ideal. Her photographs use subtle, diffused light to capture places affected by environmental change. Kantanen combines photography with digital techniques, creating images that perfectly balance the meticulously crafted chaos of colors, distortions, blurs, and brushstrokes. By stretching pixels to resemble dripping paint, she introduces brushstrokes that contrast with the underlying images, resulting in new, dreamlike sceneries. In these idyllic scenes, viewers can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is created by the artist. In her Meadows series she focuses on various abandoned spaces in and around small Brandenburg towns. Here nature has been allowed to go undisturbed, reverting back to the times German impressionists used them as their material for their paintings. Unfortunately, with the advancement of urbanization these meadows are slowly disappearing. Kantanen’s normative interventions in her photographs remind the viewer of what nature could still be through the memory of what it was.