Teemu Kivikangas

Holy Mountain exhibited in Gallery of Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Finland. (Holy Mountain V was shown on the wall opposite to three larger images.)

"There are these pictures of mountains I shot years ago in Bolivia. I don't know why they hold such a spell on me, but I keep carrying the images with me. Like my own portable island, a place of my own, that follows me everywhere. It is an island: white snowcap thrusting out of a black sea."

The heart of the installation is a large inkjet print I have carried with me to a number of homes in Helsinki and London. Over the years the print has become badly damaged - paradoxically the picture, a mere digital inkjet print, has aquired an aura of objecthood, the damage making it an individual among possibly infinite amount of similar prints.

This image was my anchor in nomadic phases of my life. The Holy Mountain II-IV document this process: every day a new print was made, hung in my tiny London apartment and photographed. Series is turned into an ironic image of the romantic gaze upon the landscape, strecthing from Caspar Friedrich to recent photographic trends. Every image takes the sublime, pathetic landscape further away, every day the original memory fades. Grey urban landscape outside the window to the left is what remains.

Yet finally, the name referring to movie Holy Mountain (A. Jodorowsky, 1973), ends the circle. In Bolivia, mountains were worshipped as dieties. The installation is about the construction of meanings in relation to landscape. Names we give to places are important: thus, we give significance to a landscape. This cliche of an image can after all be my holy mountain.

The Holy Mountain
2009
Photographs

Exhibition history
2010:
Photokina meets Academy, Cologne, Germany
2009:
Slade School of Fine Arts, London, UK
Gallery of Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Finland

Holy Mountain exhibited at Slade School, London, UK.