Elina Vainio: Memory Palace
Beeswax is known in the history of Western philosophy as a material through which the relationship between form, matter, and perception has been explored. Its ability to transform while retaining continuity has made it a recurring example in thinking about identity (that is, an object being identical with itself) and change. Elina Vainio’s exhibition Memory Palace at Photographic Gallery Hippolyte examines this idea differently: beeswax forms the surface of a serial work, leaving both what it binds and what it protects subject to change. In this way, it makes visible how the image is always somewhat inadequate to the conditions of human experience.
Vainio’s focus is on a layered and fragmented perceptual experience, a memory composed of breaks and gaps, and a corporeality that attaches itself to words while constantly tearing apart and remaining susceptible to distortion. In Vainio’s work, consciousness does not appear as a clear psychological reality, but rather as a cluster of highly contingent traces. Her experimental practice, in which artistic thinking takes place through the particularity of the method employed and is constrained by the properties of a new material, emphasises the question of the uniqueness of form and matter. In the case of speaking beings, it is this corporeal uniqueness that makes a coherent and unified mode of being, or a lasting anchoring of the self, impossible.
The body of work in the exhibition consists of photographs taken on a phone using reflections in a bent mirror film. The printed photographs are mounted onto steel plates with a thin layer of beeswax. The images are then coated with liquid beeswax which, as it solidifies, permanently binds them to the steel surface. Each individual image is, in turn, immersed in water at approximately sixty degrees Celsius and slowly lifted through the wax, which remains molten at the surface of the water. Through repeated treatments, the beeswax coating creates a form that moves away from the image’s original photographic surface, giving the image a new shape. Optical distortions, material layers, and the gradual loss of definition are set alongside the internal logic of the images: rather than being carried by clear meaning, the viewer is held by the repetition of perceptual and linguistic distortions. In Vainio’s process, deviations in the image do not point to dysfunction but bring into view the absurd aesthetics of human existence.
- Aino-Marjatta Mäki, psychoanalyst
Elina Vainio (b. 1981) is a Helsinki-based visual artist whose installations and serial works have been exhibited at venues including Liste Art Fair Basel (2026), Ulterior Gallery, New York (2026), EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art (2025), and the Seoul Museum of Art (2025). She holds a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art & Design in London and an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki. Vainio is the recipient of the 2026 Nordea Art Foundation Art Award.
The exhibition has been supported by the Kone Foundation and the Uusimaa Regional Fund of the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
image: Elina Vainio, Self-Portrait from the exhibition Memory Palace, 2026.
Free entrance