Paola Guzmán Figueroa: I See My Eyes

In I see my eyes Paola returns to material recorded during the laser eye surgery she had in Colombia. Working with these images alongside experiments on colour and black-and-white 16mm film, she explores how vision can change physically and through a change of geography.

Paola’s myopia began when she was ten years old and continued to progress over the years. The surgery took place during her first visit to Colombia after moving to Finland. It was a moment when a familiar landscape was already becoming distant and a new one was beginning to take its place.

Years later, the images from the surgery resurface through film. They are exposed again to light and placed in relation to images made in Finland. Light behaves differently. It disappears and returns with the seasons. Colours shift. Distances become difficult to measure. What once appeared blurred becomes sharp, while other things become less certain.

What does it mean to see clearly when what is in front of you has also changed?

I See My Eyes moves through a space where seeing is shaped by distance, memory and time. Perhaps what comes into focus is never entirely separate from where we are looking from.

The exhibition is supported by Svenska kulturfonden and Amos Andersons fond.

 

Paola Guzmán Figueroa is a Colombian visual artist and experimental filmmaker based in Finland since 2013. Working with analogue film, photography and performance, her practice explores intergenerational memory, feminist narratives and embodied archives, drawing on personal and collective experiences to reflect on identity, transcultural passage and the body as a site of memory. She holds BA and MA degrees from the University of the Arts Helsinki and a BA in Visual Arts from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá. Her work has been exhibited at Penumbra Foundation, New York; Forum Box, Helsinki; DocLisboa, Portugal; and CICA Museum, South Korea, among other venues and festivals . She has participated in residencies at LIFT, Toronto; Saari Residence, Finland; and Residency Unlimited, New York. www.paolafernanda.com

Free entrance