Karuizawa (Happy Birthday John), Galleria Huuto, Helsinki, Finland, 2026

Paula Saraste and Aarni Vaarnamo’s 19-minute film Karuizawa (Happy Birthday John) was shown in Galleria Huuto in Helsinki in an exhibition of the same name. The work was filmed in the autumn of 2024 in Japan, in places where John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent time in the 1970s. The soundtrack features a partly AI-generated phone conversation between Paula Saraste and John Lennon. They discuss their secret love affair and arrange a meeting in Karuizawa, shown in documentary footage. The work includes visits to places such as the legendary Mampei Hotel. Relying on landscape-based storytelling, the work combines themes of longing for love and constructed memory.

The film was produced by Elokuvaosuuskunta Paraika and supported by AVEK Audiovisual Centre, the sound design was made by Jarkko Kela

Revived Spirits, Galleria Aski, Turku, Finland 2025

The film Karuizawa (Happy Birthday John) had its Finnish Premiere in the exhibition Revived Spirits at Galleria Aski in Turku, Finland, in October 2025. Galleria Aski featured works by Laura Iisalo, Paula Saraste, and Aarni Vaarnamo.

The exhibition was composed of two series of works, united by a sense of longing. Laura Iisalo’s Pigeon Heart is based on the life of the artist’s great-great-grandmother. Paula Saraste and Aarni Vaarnamo’s Karuizawa (Happy Birthday John) is a film about the attempt to meet John Lennon in Japan.

The 19-minute film was shot in Japan in the fall of 2024. The work is site-specific, filmed at locations where John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent time in the 1970s, including the Hotel Mampei, where the couple stayed. The soundtrack includes a partly AI-generated phone conversation between Paula Saraste and John Lennon. They discuss their relationship and arrange a meeting in Karuizawa. The work combines landscape-based storytelling with themes of longing for love and constructed memory.

Vast Distances, Galleria Becker, Jyväskylä, Finland 2023

The exhibition Vast Distances deals with the entanglement of two separate beings across metaphysical boundaries. It suggests that the artist and Lennon have experienced the moments shown in the pictures together, they have walked on the beach together and laid in bed together. The exhibition is influenced by feminist scientific research. It uses fandom as methodology and suggests that touch does not require simultaneous presence, but can happen over vast distances. It offers the viewer a place as an experiencer of the moments on display and the idea of ​​the infinity of these other places and times. The photographs are reproductions of documentary images from magazines and books, of which the main character, John Lennon, has been wholly or partially removed by digital image processing. Beneath the photographs and the video installation the exhibition comprises also pieces of text to create an alternative history.

Walking from beneath marble, espresso and palm trees
to the electric night of New York
I encounter my lover any moment
scattered and folded through time and being.

download list of works

Paraika | Six Works, Ballhaus Rixdorf Studios, Berlin 2022

The film Let us Stay for a While had its German Premiere in the exhibition Paraika | Six Works in Ballhaus Rixdorf Studios in Berlin, in September 2022. It was a group exhibition and screening weekend featuring work from artists: Tuukka Haapakorpi, Juhani Koivumäki, Joakim Pusenius, Venla Roponen, Paula Saraste and Aarni Vaarnamo. Encompassing short-film, installation and a feature-length film screening, the exhibition highlighted an eclectic range of film-based works. Weaving through visions of an isolated and precarious future, the legacy of humans in the wake of catastrophe and portraits of meditative stillness, the works were united by considerations of the changing nature of human relations both with each other and the world around them. Through poetic visions and experimental fictions questions were raised that go beyond the narratives of the work. 

The exhibition was supported by Ballhaus Rixdorf Studios and Arts Promotion Centre Finland.

Let us Stay for a While, gallery Myymälä2, Helsinki 2022

The film Let us Stay for a While (2022) was shown in the exhibition with the same name at the gallery Myymälä2 in Helsinki, July 2022. The exhibition by Sara Kovamäki and Paula Saraste approached the experience of time and the relation of different media to time through the parallel and mirroring levels created between film and performance. References to nature and machinery like film production where even nature can be part of a set design, were intertwined in the gallery space into a dialog. Encounters were created between what is planned and things happening by chance. Different ways of dealing with time emerged in the exhibition space, in the film and in the performance.

The exhibited film by Paula Saraste tells the story of a weekend on a lonely island. The characters detect a mysterious accident near the island and rescue one survivor from the water. Unexplained incidents sensitise the protagonist to past experiences and fears.

The installation in the exhibition space by Sara Kovamäki was inspired by the island featured in the film as well as the filming work itself. It contained materials collected from the shooting locations as well as video footage with moments and memories from the time spent on the island. The performances took place in the gallery space twice as scheduled and once by chance.

The exhibition and the artworks were supported by The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture Finland AVEK and Arts Promotion Centre Finland.

Fragments from the Unknown, gallery Forum Box, Helsinki 2021

The film Weiter zum Wasser (2021) was shown in the exhibition Fragments from the Unknown at the gallery Forum Box in Helsinki, January 2021. The exhibition by Dave Berg, Juhani Koivumäki, Joakim Pusenius and Paula Saraste explored the marches of consciousness: other forms of being, the transcendent of meditation, the loneliness of futurism and absurd fear. It was based on the idea of being on the edge of the incomprehensible.

The exhibition featured four films and media artwork completed in 2019-2021. The works approached the unknown, the foreign and the impossible from different perspectives. They formed a whole that took the viewer on a dreamlike journey. In the darkened exhibition space, narratives opened up to new spaces and times. The works in the exhibition were videos, single and multi-channel installations.

The exhibition was characterized by a very mundane post-sleep state, where there is only a strong, mindless feeling left over from the night. What these images are and where they come from was not so much relevant. More important was how they affect us, where they take us, and how those images remain experiences, part of us. The artists share a strong intuition that it is interesting to delve into the subject of the unknown and the absurd through film and moving image. The works approach moving image free of rules and conventions as a detached encounter between strange and new.

The works are based on the idea of a past pierced by stories, pointing to absurd, ambiguous and contradictory series of events. The epic-historical causes (how this has come about) and the cosmic consequences (what follows from the action) are beyond our stories. After the era of great narratives, there are excerpts, fragments of events larger than man, whose causes and outcomes are unknown and which the space of all possible stories can only hint at. Stories are always too big to comprehend in their entirety. What is left in the end is a human being, limited by their perceptional capacities, facing the overly large world that appears absurd. The aim was to approach moving image unbiased and as a valuable, non-calculative medium in itself.

Read a review of the exhibition in the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat 30.1.2021 here
Download a critique of the exhibition in Taide-lehti 2021/1 (only in Finnish) here

The exhibition was supported by: AVEK, 
Arts Promotion Centre Finland
, The Finnish Cultural Foundation, 
The Alfred Kordelin Foundation, 
Kulturfonden för Finland och Norge
 and VISEK

All things, passing, Photographic Gallery Hippolyte Studio, Helsinki 2020

The exhibition All things, passing is based on ideas about fandom, desire, and hopes. It examines the photographic medium as a means of display and representation and considers its relation to reality, the unobtainable, and death.

The exhibition comprises numerous photographs, a piece of text, and a partially ready-made-object installation. The photographs that are on view are reproductions of documentary images from magazines and books, of which the main character, John Lennon, has been wholly or partially removed by digital image processing. The text in the body of work describes a memory, and like a photograph, engenders a theoretical perspective of the past, and reflects Saraste’s relationship to John. The exhibition softly persuades the viewer to contemplate the potential and importance of forgetting and discontinuous recollection.

Year 2020 marks the 40th anniversary of John Lennon’s death in New York. All things, passing thematises Lennon’s absence: he is no longer photographable. Saraste’s images raise the question of the existence of an aura—of energy around a living being. Can this be detected from a picture, even if Lennon’s image has been removed from the composition? Saraste takes the imagery of Lennon for her sole ownership by removing him from the gaze of others. Aggressively counteracting photography’s normative role of remembrance, this additionally demonstrates an act of jealous possession. Though incomparable to the ultimate violence committed, Saraste suggests parallels to an act of murder and this artistic gesture of erasure. In addition to deleting the personhood of the artist, there are only few clues or visual traces of the removal left in the work. Here the documentary form is explicitly stretched, processed and digitally reconstructed—further revealing how today’s photo creator can easily create her worldview and history. The exhibition combines fundamental questions regarding the power of photography to immortalise and document—while simultaneously questioning what lies beyond the frame.

download handout / list of works

Haunt, HilbertRaum, Berlin 2018

Eine erste Seele ringt panisch nach Luft – sich gewiss, es ist ihr
letzter Atemzug.
In einer Lücke zwischen zwei Atemzügen dehnt sich eine zweite
Seele aus – sie betrachtet ihren eigenen kleinen Tod.
Der ersten Seele zuinnerst eine Krise – eine Leugnung – sie
fürchtet, es wird keinen nächsten Atemzug geben.
Die zweite Seele – ganz in der Schwebe – wandelt von hier nach
da und in die Fremde, um Stätten heimzusuchen und ein Zuhause;
 das geheime Verlangen, das sie mit Leben erfüllt.
Eine dritte Seele ist entflohen und irrt umher, sie sucht nach
Etwas, das sie zu erkennen vermag – sie ist verloren in der
unheimlichen exotischen Fremde.
Hinter einem Spiegel hält die zweite Seele Ausschau, die dritte
fühlt eine Gegenwart davor, vielleicht ein Gefühl – und als sie
sich ausstreckt, schlüpft es durch ihre Finger.

Heimweh.

Die zweite Seele bricht voll der Hoffnung auf, ihr nächster
Stammplatz wird ihr Zuhause werden.
Die dritte Seele bleibt zurück, eine ortsverlorene Touristin,
losgelöst, in der Übersetzung verloren gegangen.
Die erste Seele spürt mit Erleichterung das Nahen des nächsten
Atemzuges.
Die zweite Seele flieht rückwärts.
Letzen Endes werden sie nicht sterben. Sie werden leben.
Es war eine Heimsuchung. Die verlorenen Erinnerungen der
Vorfahren und der exotischen Geister versuchen, eine Verbindung
aufzunehmen.
 

One spirit takes a panicked breath, thinking it will be her last.
A second spirit expands in the gap that opens between two
breaths, observing her own small death.
A mounting crisis in the first spirit, a denial, as she fears the next
breath will never come. In limbo, the second spirit goes here and there and abroad to
 haunt places, searching for home, the secret desire that animates her.
A third spirit has flown and is meandering, looking for something
she can recognise, lost in places in the uncanny exotic abroad.
Behind a mirror there the second spirit looks out, in front of it
the third spirit senses a presence, a mood maybe something to
capture – and reaching out, it slips between her fingers.

Homesickness.

The second spirit leaves full of hope that the next haunt will be
her home.
The third spirit stays behind, a tourist dislocated, disconnected,
lost in translation.
The first spirit sees the next breath nearing with relief.
The second spirit flying back.
They will not die after all. They will live.
It was a haunting. The lost memories of ancestors and exotic
spirits try to make contact.

download handout

ROHTO / REMEDY, Galleria Uusi Kipinä, Lahti 2017

The exhibition Rohto / Remedy dealed with questions of presense, power and different roles through installation, videos, photographs and performances that could be seen as individual works even though they were also part of the spatial collage built into the exhibition space. Together with different materials they linked various situations, spaces and moments together during the performances.

The exhibition was part of a long-term collaboration with the visual artist and dancer Sara Kovamäki. In our artistic work we question hierarchies and power relations and we are interested in the presence of different roles and their influence in ourselves as well as in our surroundings. Through play and the absurd we attack the unstable relation and dynamics of hierarchical structures.

Varasto / Storage, Galleria Lapinlahti, Helsinki 2017

Varasto (transl. storage) was an exhibition based on invitations and it featured works from 21 artists from Finland and abroad, organized and curated together with Heli Kaskinen and Noora Sandgren. It consisted of photos, videos, paintings, installations and performances from well-known as well as younger artists. The exhibition spread to Gallery Lapinlahti’s four spaces in August-September 2017 and made the artists hidden artworks visible again pointing out different aspects of storing the meaningful.

The exhibiting artists: Sampo Apajalahti, Mika Elo, Eeva Hannula, Heikki Heinonen, Antti Huittinen, Marko Karo, Heli Kaskinen, Sara Kovamäki, Jyrki Parantainen, Iiri Poteri, Jorma Puranen, Joakim Pusenius, Tuomo Rainio, Aura Saarikoski, Noora Sandgren, Paula Saraste, Sanni Seppo, Kaarlo Stauffer, Nathalie Tafelmacher-Magnat and Roi Vaara.

Where do the works of art disappear a er an exhibition on ends? They end up in different art collections, in the homes of the artists and their relatives or in the corners of their studios. They hide on hard drives, tailor made transport boxes and cardboard folders. The artworks travel by buses, trams and are transported by hand between neighborhoods and countries, from warehouse to another. Much of their lives are therefore hidden in invisible structures.

Varasto exhibition shed light into stored treasures. The works were selected based on the artists’ own suggestions, examining the idea of the storage from different perspectives. A storage is the place for memories and memorizing, it raises emotions and allows observation of the past. Seen as a sensory, bodily and private space it invites the visitor to think about the need of storing and keeping things as well as ones own existence. The forms of storing remain many yet they all have the same function: to preserve the meaningful.

There are storages everywhere and at the same time new art is created. Some of the works of the exhibition had been shown only once, some never before. The exhibition offered a glimpse into the storages of the artists. At the same time it was a chance to ponder how the life of these artworks could last longer at the times of the pressure of having to constantly produce new works. Art can not escape the greatest challenges of our time, the questions of ecology and sustainability.

Transitions, Galleria Huuto, Helsinki 2017

The exhibition Transitions at Galleria Huuto June-July 2017 approached mixed feelings triggered by flying and traveling from different perspectives. The exhibition took shape through thoughts and notes inspired by human fear and through the examination of its characteristics. The anxiety caused by flying also appears as a journey to an inexplicable area, as both feelings and accidents sometimes remain unexplained. Fear of flying is the archetype of a modern phobia, consisting of different feelings, like fear of losing control or claustrophobia. Fear intertwines with death and flying can enable one to imagine and practice one’s own death. In the exhibition, the feeling was displayed as a physical and mental space in which some absurd elements were also highlighted. Featured were, for example, photographs of items that help nervous passengers when flying. The exhibition featured installations, videos and photographs that are notes of fear, its manifestations, attempts to free oneself from it and also links to the simultaneous presence and possibility of death.

download list of works

Kemal Can+Sara Kovamäki+Paula Saraste, Exhibition Labratory Project Room, Helsinki 2015

The work All things, passing was first featured in the exhibition Kemal Can+Sara Kovamäki+Paula Saraste in 2015. It is a conceptual work about fandom and desire consisting of 28 photographs and a digital video projection. The photographs are reproductions of printed documentary photographs where the main subject, John Lennon, is removed and replaced with imaginary pictorial material.

Media Ambages, HilbertRaum, Berlin 2015

Both ambiguous medium and also a long, detailed story in Latin, Media Ambages headlines a manifesto about photography and moving image. What is the stuff of image? The show, curated by Nat Tafelmacher - Magnat, explored how this intangible medium, not at all a clean window opening onto a clearly definable reality, instead becomes, for the viewers' private kinos in their minds, a projection surface, a mirror, creating ''realities'' - the witnesses' very own stories - out of thin pixel and paper.