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.