tuula närhinen


SELF-PORTRAIT IN SNOW
The Family Tree


Counterintuitively, instead of auto-portraits, these head dives into snow generated depictions of strangers surfacing from the bosom of the earth. In browsing this ghostly archive, Närhinen was surprised to find the spitting image of her bearded late father and, subsequently, she spotted more vivid likenesses to other family members as well.

Starting with the images of her ancestors to portrayals of her unborn children, the speculative record yielded the phenotype of her entire clan. Among the blindly generated portrait she was also able to identify some serendipitous imprints, such as the portrait of one famous Finn, the former President of the Republic Urho Kekkonen. This ephemeral tribe emerging from the snow allows us to envision a cultural DNA reaching from totemic past towards future generations.

I was surprised to find this spitting image of my bearded late father (left) among the recorded imprints.
The facial expression shows how painful it was to press the visage against a thin and hard layer of crystallised snow .
The Family Tree was exhibited 3.9. - 21.9.2025 at the Academy of Fine Arts in the University of the Arts Helsinki.
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The Family Tree includes 186 photographic records of snow imprints, generated by pressing the visage against the snow.
Atmospheric effects, such as changes in temperature or moisture left their marks on the imprints .
At the margins of the Family Tree, the imprints are more anonymous and skull like.
At the far left of the wall installation we’ll encounter one famous Finn, Urho Kekkonen, who served as the President of Finland from 1956 to 1982.
President Kekkonen's pictorial DNA seems to be serendipituosly connected to my pictorial heritage. I made use of the reservoir of my old glasses and wore them as props to produce more intricate versions of snow imprints.