Politics of Visibility, Form & Diffractive Temporalities
Politics of Visibility, Form & Diffractive Temporalities
Lorena Articardi (b. 1992, Italian-Uruguayan) is an artist, researcher, and curator based in Helsinki, working with a research-based image practice –primarily photography and film. She describes her studio work as a material-discursive study on light, approaching light as both her medium and subject. Light compels her to work with mediums that engage the dimensionalities of time and space; it intersects with linearity and foregrounds a genealogy –an altered temporality and a situated positionality –a dis-position. The sampling gesture of capturing in frames is defined as much by what is light-inscribed as by the gaps that have been intently left unexposed. It makes the sampling gesture, the construction of meaning –visible; and with it, the political nature of form itself.
Her curatorial work turns to photography and film as sites where the ordinal in form is contested, where legibility must reckon with the erasures, the histories effaced by displacement –a process developed through experimental and expanded approaches that often take shape in montage and essayistic form. Her practice attends to the structures that regulate how images circulate and accrue meaning –the institutional, historical, and material devices that mediate what is possible to know or recognise. Through her approach, these structures can be reworked through accountable, non-extractive modes of inquiry, allowing epistemic margins, temporal dissonances, and other genealogies to be encountered through relational co-constitution.
She holds a Licentiate Degree in Image and Sound Engineering from Universidad Católica del Uruguay (2011–2017) and an MA in Photography from Aalto University, Finland (2021–2023), and has undertaken MFA studies at Trondheim Academy of Fine Arts, NTNU, Norway (2020–2021). Lorena has taught as an assistant professor at Universidad Católica del Uruguay (2017–2021). Since then, her practice has focused on archival research –preservation, restoration and contextual re-evaluation of film and photographic materials– developed through work with institutional and artist-run frameworks. She has carried out curatorial and archival work across Uruguay, Norway, Germany, and Finland –from developing film archives to working with private collections and artist-run initiatives. She is board member at Filmverkstaden (FI) and, also, a member of LaboratorioFAC (UY), part of the Contemporary Art Foundation (FAC). Her work is held in private collections in Finland and Germany, and has been exhibited in institutions such as the Finnish Museum of Photography FI, Tsinghua University Art Museum CN, and Museo Juan Manuel Blanes UY, and in ‘Jojaha-Paridad’, the 3rd International Art Biennale PY, among others.
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(Of Sunburns and Sunspots, Notebook Entry.). Even the brightest of stars bears dark spots –wears them as scars. All surfaces have an inscribed memory, and yet we’re squinting. The ground, the acrimony, the burn. The kiss, your touch, the burn. The sun, the tan, the burn. The salt will help you heal, it’ll wash the sand off your skin.
Publications
[Current]
2025-6, ‘Visualidades Expandidas’, as part of the ‘Panorama of Experimental Film Referents’ programme. Laboratorio FAC, Contemporary Art Foundation. Curated by Carolina Sobrino and Guillermo Zabaleta, together with Ángela López Ruiz, Sofía Martínez Frenkel, Ángel Pajares and Joel Pachas. Group Exhibition. Museo Juan Manuel Blanes. Montevideo UY.
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2025, 'Discourse at 16 fps', Gallery Week Finland. Fringe Gallery, Filmverkstaden. Vaasa FI.
2025, Guest Room: Felix Hoffmann, Mona Schubert & Marit Lena Herrmann. Der Grief, Organisation for Contemporary Photography. Munich DE.
2025, 'Discourse at 16 fps'. Curated by Julian Ross. Fringe Gallery, Filmverkstaden. Solo Exhibition. Vaasa FI.
2025, ‘Binding Structures’. Invited by Rebecca Sandelin. Razobill Gallery and Books. Solo Exhibition. Ekenäs FI.
2025, Spazio MAGMA, NABA –Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti. Group Exhibition. Rome IT.
2024, ‘Technophilia and the “New” Society’. Kulttuuritila Merirasti. Group Exhibition. Helsinki FI.
2024, ‘“Du tvingas reagera.”’. Föreningen Luckan. Solo Exhibition. Helsinki FI.
2023, Guest Room: Simon Baker & Aden Vincendeau. Der Grief, Organisation for Contemporary Photography. Munich DE.
2023, 'Dialogues: An Ode to Textile Stories'. Oodi Helsinki Central Library. Group exhibition. Helsinki FI.
2023, ‘Tides’. Espoo Cultural Centre. Group exhibition. Espoo FI.
2023, ‘Softcore’. V1 Gallery, Aalto University. Solo exhibition. Espoo FI.
2023, ‘MoA 23’. Finnish Museum of Photography. Group exhibition. Helsinki FI.
2022, ‘Panorámica Experimental’. Laboratorio FAC, Contemporary Art Foundation. Centro Cultural de España. Group Exhibition. Montevideo UY.
2022, ‘Anthology’. V1 Gallery, Aalto University. Solo exhibition. Espoo FI.
2022, ‘Daughter of Chaos’. V1 Gallery, Aalto University. Joint exhibition with artist Yujie Zhou. Espoo FI.
2021, ‘Material Thinking’. Tsinghua University Art Museum. Group Exhibition. Beijing CN.
2021, Shed. SALT, Nyhavna, Trondheim Kommune. Group Exhibition. Trondheim NO.
2020, Open Academy. Trondheim Academy of Fine Arts, Gallery KiT. Group Exhibition. Trondheim NO.
2020, ‘Rom’, collective zine published by Røyne Forlag. Trondheim Art Book Fair X. Litteraturhuset i Trondheim, and Trondheim Kunstmuseum Gråmølna. Trondheim NO.
2020, Trondheim Open. Trondheim Academy of Fine Arts, Gallery KiT. Group Exhibition. Trondheim NO.
2020, ‘Jojaha-Paridad’, 3rd International Art Biennale: Asunción PY. Laboratorio FAC, Contemporary Art Foundation. Group Exhibition.
2019, ‘JAM’. Laboratorio FAC, Contemporary Art Foundation. Group Exhibition. Centro Cultural de España. Montevideo UY.
{Upcoming, 2026-7}
‘Liminal Cartographies’. Curated by Salla Sorri and Lorena Articardi. Film Programme.
{Upcoming, 2026}
‘Enquiry for Ancestral Memory’. Curated by Ramiro Camelo (Myymälä2) and Julija Pociūtė (Pamenkalnio Gallery). Assistant Curator: Lorena Articardi. Group Exhibition.
Myymälä2. Helsinki FI; Pamenkalnio Gallery. Vilnius LT.
{Upcoming, 2026}
‘Frames’. Artist: Rebecca Sandelin. Razobill Gallery and Books. Solo Exhibition. Ekenäs FI.
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2022, 16th Issue (Co-Edited/Curated) –Uncertain States of Scandinavia, an artist-led quarterly broadsheet newspaper showcasing lens-based art. NW Gallery, Copenhagen Photo Festival, Copenhagen DK; and Supermarket Art Fair, Stockholm SE.
2019, ‘JAM’. Curated by: Ángela López Ruiz, Gonzalo Rodríguez Novellino, Guillermo Zabaleta, Lorena Articardi, and Martin Kroch. Group Exhibition. Laboratorio FAC, Contemporary Art Foundation. Group Exhibition. Centro Cultural de España. Montevideo UY.
2025, Invited by Rebecca Sandelin. Razobill Gallery and Books. Ekenäs FI.
2025, International Curatorial Residency: ’Enquiry for Ancestral Memory’. Invited by Myymälä2. Helsinki FI.
Liminal Cartographies is organised into thematic constellations; it moves through maritime formations, insular formations, moments of perceptual enlargement, the diasporic or nomadic resonances suggested by the “Guajiros” section, the forest as an implicated and contested commons, and, finally, states of mind that fold landscape into the hierarchical contingency of mind and state alike. These are not strictly outlined; they are invitations to trace recurring formations –sea as archive and boundary; islands as sites of isolation and exchange; forest as repository, and as resource; inward topographies as inscribed with care and loss, as drenched in refusal. –Each film constitutes an attempt to map these configurations.
Building on the proposed positional frame, the selection privileges works whose aesthetic devices –montage, cross-cut, recurrence, duration– make methodological claims about how to see. Each film tests how form can hold connections –correspondences– how meaning arises not through depiction but through the movement between images. Some pieces linger in duration; they stage slow registers of attention that disclose time as an unmitigated instrument of enquiry. Duration thickens perception; it stays with what resists articulation. Landscape appears as a surface of inscription, marked by the repetition of labour and the domestic, the texture of waiting, of intimacy. It moves through territories sedimented by histories of belonging and dispossession; histories of violence, of extraction. Other works turn to transience, to minimal interventions that insist on the political force of small acts: an act of care, a practised silence, a circuitous memory. Here, scale itself becomes a discursive and ethical choice. The films in Liminal Cartographies appear to measure proximity through time, through stillness, attentive to how what unfolds before the camera –what is sought to be captured– cannot be contained within a single frame or an interrupted sequence.
Formal strategies, then, read as evidence. Montage reconfigures –deviates– the direction of this syntaxis in a geological unfolding, as if it were simply leading room. As if the lay of the land could be contained in that frame, in that sequence, by setting forth a sense of coexistence and rupture in contention. In doing so, the geological ordering is released into a plural, divergent arrangement. It opens onto latitudes where material and perceptual strata appear out of alignment, a reminder that these northern terrains accrue their own irregular tempos and densities. The essayistic voiceover and layered soundscapes operate as epistemic interventions. The framing choices –the long take –the displaced close-up –the intermittent cut –their very reiteration, stage acts of witnessing and forgetting, articulate instantiations of place, insist that where attention settles is itself evidentiary.
In Liminal Cartographies, the curatorial premise is less a matter of thematic grouping or categorising than of composing a field that resonates across adjacency. It is a form of sustained reading, where correlation allows patterns –methods– to surface and differ; be revisited, and reoriented. In their juxtaposition, certain questions –subjects– subtly thicken; and so the programme assembles these films as propositions –as interlocutors in a collective enquiry. It places their divergent itineraries in proximity so that what each work discloses –its temporal grain, its ethical inflexion, its mode of attending to place– urges us to read across films. Alongside one another, faint lines gather definition; they offer a mode of thinking with place that is not declarative –it is cumulative. Strain, intimacy, drift, or displacement register without being named; their quiet consistencies, their asynchronies, trace the liminal frame our understanding is here subjected to.
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Curated by: Lorena Articardi and Salla Sorri.
Produced by Yvapurü Studios.
‘Enquiry for Ancestral Memory’, 2026. Curated by Ramiro Camelo and Julija Pociūtė, with Lorena Articardi as assistant curator. Group Exhibition. Myymälä2. Helsinki FI; Pamenkalnio Gallery. Vilnius LT.
‘Enquiry for Ancestral Memory’ convenes artists and curators based in Finland, Sweden, and Lithuania to examine intergenerational knowledge systems and relational practices tied to land-based sovereignties. Situated within a Nordic-Baltic context, the project is jointly formulated with the institutions Myymälä2 (Helsinki), Köttinspektionen (Uppsala), and Pamėnkalnio Galerija (Vilnius). Through artistic exchanges and new commissions developed across these contexts, the exhibition aims to attend to communities that sustain deep ties to their landscapes, highlighting their role as custodians of natural-cultural heritage. The works emerging from this dialogue will travel between the participating countries in 2026, opening spaces for reflection on environmental justice and shared responsibility.
The project explores how ancestral forms of knowledge –those rooted in embodied, intergenerational relations to land– can inform contemporary practices addressing neo-colonial ecologies. It proposes that inherited forms of remembrance might serve as strategies for reconnecting with and protecting natural resources, increasingly threatened by extractivist and capitalist pressures. By engaging with situated ecologies and more-than-human agencies, the exhibition foregrounds acts of remembering that resist colonial systems of thought. What emerges is less an exhibition about memory than a curatorial process through memory. It is a spatial and temporal unfolding in which the act of remembering becomes a method to intersect with –to articulate and respond to the ethical and postnatural urgencies of the present.
The curatorial team – Julija Pociūtė, Ramiro Camelo, and myself, Lorena Articardi, as assistant curator – began outlining the project’s conceptual and organisational framework through a collective process of research and exchange. This work was carried out during a curatorial research residency hosted at Myymälä2 (Helsinki) in February 2024. Over the course of the residency, the team met with local artists, mapped shared research trajectories, and presented the project publicly through an open discussion at Myymälä2. These processes directly inform the programming of two exhibitions, enabling insights generated through artist-curator dialogue to circulate across participating institutions and communities, extending knowledge exchange beyond individual practices and situating the project within an evolving, transnational framework of collective practice.
The 16th Issue of Uncertain States of Scandinavia was edited by Dagny Hay, Tor S Ulstein, Charlie Hay, Nina Worren and Lorena Articardi. Design By James Young. Printed by Polaris Trykk & Distribusjon Trondheim.
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Uncertain States Scandinavia, 16th Issue.
DA NO 916337027
Self-portraiture is framed between the self and its anonymity, between an uncovered truthful sight and the reflective character of the blank canvas. Between being artist, subject and that of a diminished control, torn by the seemingly dismissed or neglected act of having to give up looking through the viewfinder. Labelling photography as a mechanical means for reproduction echoes this of a diminished control –a consequence of the apparatus’s gradual filtering of light, a record that has no recollection of its blinding presence. As we choose to no longer stand behind the camera, we do still hear the shutter being triggered at our release; yet all our eyes can remember is that imprinted afterimage, a warm tainted retinal persistence produced by the firing of flashbulbs.
The 16th issue of Uncertain States Scandinavia includes a selection of artworks that approach self-portraiture through the lens of a vast range of practices, featuring the work of Henriette Sagfjord, Charlie Hay, Linda Hansen, Nina Worren, Leonard Vincent Rode, Sunniva Hestenes, Hans Jørgen Ro, Aage A. Mikalsen, Dagny Hay, Jeelena Rai, and Paulina Tamara Cid.
Henriette Sagfjord bends and deflects our notions of portraiture and landscape, inviting us to transpose that which lies within the self to the inherent poetry of an immense and seemingly uncharted nature. Self and nature are then indivisible, and the longing for divine grace pertaining to the romantic sublime is replaced by a will to root, to connect with what is already there, here, around. The mist, the moss, the underframe and foliage –set not a backdrop but rhythm; a score concealed as woven with one accord.
Drenched in see-through honesty, Charlie Hay’s work discloses a deep-rooted connection with space and landscape that exceeds what can be captured and attained by the camera; a connection that has also been made evident in its engagement with the material quality of the photochemical image. His imagery, by virtue of mood and metaphor, is concerned with what is there to be seen –though, this used to arise as ultimately unspoken of. Charlie’s self-portraiture, however, voices those thoughts with a humorous vein that is far from deflective –if anything, it salts wounds with utter care. Rattling between the mundane in our thoughts, the irrelevance and strangeness of our experiences, tedium –at large, an overwhelming existential boredom product of the pressure and delusional expectations attuned to contemporary life; what is then showcased is that which isn’t really visible. The artist craves to have us see through his eyes and so casts light upon his very personal distorted notions of self.
Linda Hansen’s self-portraiture finds her posing as a vessel for a relatable whole and plural self –who is battling and afflicted by the usual same. Her work has us look closely at the fleeting and transient; taking the form of a staged symbolically-charged stillness which is drawn from the ephemeral. The lack of relevance or persistence attributed to the locations depicted by the artist, strengthens our acknowledgement of a relevant yet fugitive fading existence. It is relevant as it is worthy of becoming subject, regardless of carrying along with it the weight of experience –a weight capable of scarring both mind and body.
Once again, attuned to an approach that looks at self-portraiture as one capable of conveying a narrative that surpasses the identity and individuality of the self –while heavily reliant on the self-referential and intimate–; Nina Worren’s practice directs our seeing towards junctures that feel loaded with the distinctive angst of the in-between. What is to be looked at is the unremarkable quotidian. It is either the clear-cut lengthy pauses or those moments that go easily unnoticed, concealed in the blink of an eye, which are to set the tone for her alluring hazy depictions of the everyday.
Youth Revisited warps time by the agency of re-enactment; through holding onto the fixed invariable and evoking remembrance, through reinforcing memory’s unreliable and fluid character. In a rose-coloured collection of mundane anchored moments, Leonard Vincent Rode retraces his steps and ventures into the customary known using photography as a means to resurface and dust off old omens. By engaging in this act of performance as an isolated self –as much as a collective plurality of moments and voices–, what is in essence portrayed is their convergence and the subtle nuances of experience.
In a compelling balance between that which is explicit and that which could be described as metaphorically charged, Sunniva Hestenes’ crude imagery explores time-bound traces and tainted memories in the light of grief and the complexity –thus, often burden– related to bloodline relationships. Whether grief is presented as attached to the memory of a person or as product of the generalized notions and conventional attributions tied to the idea of motherhood, the determination that allows us to term Sunniva’s narrative as playfully inconclusive leaves room for semiotic readings between the lines and a bumpy –though seamless– flickering through pictorial symbolism.
With his series Saturn Return, Hans Jørgen Ro aims to dissect a time of distress as the likeness of distant memories that have taken the form of a clear image –a repetitive token of troubled waters passed. Whether cosmic or casual, memories live on in our bodies, latent; they keep us alert as we have come to terms with the uneasiness of having no real control. In contrast, his photography comes across as perfectly calculated, harmonically composed, with no room for stellar chaos other than that of a lingering calm tension. We are faced with a shift in perception, the stillness of the image breaks off a downward spiral motion; Hans is, therefore, able to look back at himself in a manner that feels both estranged and oddly familiar.
Challenging a lens-based preconception of –not solely image-making, but primarily– self-portraiture, Aage A. Mikalsen’s project deals with a take on imaging that’s fairly aggressive. It bears the capacity to produce an imprint that lives on as more than an immediate object or kinship. Have it be radiation or mere self imposed projections that are product of our mind, we are faced with an image for which we may lack the literacy required to comprehend. Still tangled to the idea of belief as reliant on what is to be seen with our own eyes; the question remains, is all other sensory reading dismissable at the lack of appearance, at the lack of foreseeable visible proof?
Foul winding cycles, beaming blue-light screens, the ticking of clocks, and the heavy sorrow of an anguished and restless youth dawn on Dagny Hay as she conceived the Empress of Light; a ruthless warrior, an alter ego –a duality that has now merged as one with the artist. Blinded and enlightened by an allegory that feeds on contradictions, her embodied pathos illustrates this turmoil; –she is impatient and fearless, she is the antagonist on the verge of entropy. Over the use of a luminous deistic representation that decisively references popular culture, Dagny is looked at –and, most definitely, looked up to–; furthermore, she dauntlessly looks back and becomes semblance. A leitmotif –The likeness of an idea, blazing light in the darkest hour.
Paper People comes across as puckish and blithesome. Jeelena Rai’s wonderland presumes the two-dimensionality of paper cut-outs as breezy, and the pixel-based grid of her medium as what breathes life into her self-portraiture practice. Nailing an unyielded material presence of the repeatedly overlooked digital capacity for texture, Jeleena’s series seeks refuge for the emotionally burdensome in flirty and colourful compositions that, yet again, pair collage techniques with worldmaking practices.
Standing on the shoulders of giants –in reference to how Undress draws inspiration from Jemima Stehli’s series Strip, 1990-2000–, Paulina Tamara Cid gives a queer shift to the many well-established preluding stances based on a male gaze critique. Instead, the series has us women engage with how we look at each other; bringing forwards –often unuttered– issues amongst which we find consent, domain, and the roles of both subject and object –the ways in which they are different and the ways in which they are essentially seen as same. Photography is then document, and the shutter release becomes a trigger for discussion, an imprint of control, an affect of our gaze.
Edited/Curated by: Dagny Hay, Tor S Ulstein, Charlie Hay, Nina Worren and Lorena Articardi.
Artists: Henriette Sagfjord, Charlie Hay, Linda Hansen, Nina Worren, Leonard Vincent Rode, Sunniva Hestenes, Hans Jørgen Ro, Aage A. Mikalsen, Dagny Hay, Jeelena Rai, and Paulina Tamara Cid.
JAM’ was part of a series of expanded analogue cinema nights in which a live visual score was cast as a performative light installation across an arrangement of juxtaposed screens. Presented in December 2019 on the terrace of Centro Cultural de España (CCE) in Montevideo, Uruguay, the projections engaged the surrounding architectural features of the space, exhibiting 16mm, Super 8, and 8mm films –which included original works, home movies, manipulated materials, and archival footage collected since 2007. The event operated less as a programme of discrete screenings than as a single, dispersed apparatus in which fragments of collective memory were modulated and re-assembled.
The project’s curatorial axis centred on archival reactivation as a political gesture. The heterogeneous body of materials assembled for the event and arranged without hierarchical distinction –was re-inscribed and presented as counter-archives: mnemonic traces that expose forms of rupture shaped by migration and entangled temporal scales. Through montage, projection density, simultaneity and material interference, the event enacted practices of recuperation and contested legibility –making visible convergent and divergent timelines that linear historiographic expectations have elided. In this register, the process itself becomes a form of intervention: a materially anchored attempt to reclaim and rearticulate histories effaced by displacement and the erasures produced by institutional neglect. ‘JAM’ articulated analogue film practices as instruments of historical repair and collective narration –practices in which material form is inseparable from political contention.
Laboratorio FAC operates as an autonomous, artist-run laboratory within the Contemporary Art Foundation (FAC) in Uruguay, functioning as a collective platform for artistic research and production. It is dedicated to experimental and archival film practices on photochemical media, through which it has established an archive that reclaims and recontextualises Latin American film materials. The archive situates shared memory as a form of political praxis, where acts of preservation and restoration intervene in the contingencies that render certain histories occluded and materially inoperative –illegible within the cultural record. Founded in 1999 as an artist-led initiative, the Contemporary Art Foundation (FAC) is an institution committed to the dissemination and critical study of contemporary art and thought.
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Curated by: Ángela López Ruiz, Gonzalo Rodríguez Novellino, Guillermo Zabaleta, Lorena Articardi, and Martin Kroch.
Artists: Alejandra Frechero, Alejandra González Soca, Ángela López Ruiz, Belén Caravia, Carla Gianchello, Carlos Barea, Carolina Sobrino, Carolina de la Vega, Doménica Pioli, Henrike Von Dewitz, Gabriela Sellanez, Gonzalo Rodríguez Novellino, Guillermo Zabaleta, Ignacio Pacheco, Joel Pachas, Lorena Articardi, Lucía Ruggiano, Martín Klein, Martín Kroch, Mario Pacheco, Milagros Lorier, Nicolás Bruno, Bernardo Zabaleta, Teresa Puppo, Valentina Pérez.
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For a brief excerpt of video documentation, see:
‘JAM’, 2019, Laboratorio FAC.