Santeri Tuori (born 1970, Espoo, Finland) studied at the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Helsinki. A multifaceted artist, Santeri Tuori's work is primarily focussed on the properties of nature and its power to change. Photographing principally in his native Finland, his recent subjects include skies, forests and waterlilies.
For the Forest series Tuori has spent much time on the remote island of Kökar in the Aland archipelago in southwestern Finland. He photographs repeatedly the same place, from the identical spot, at different seasons and times of day, sometimes years apart. Multiple images, both black and white and colour, are then superimposed. Likewise, the moving images from the Forest series are the result of layering colour video with black and white photographs. This gives the films the clarity and richness of a photograph fused with the movement and time of a video. The series, like all his work, reveal his preoccupation with the passage of time.
Building on his distinctive layering technique, Tuori’s series entitled Black Trees, created during his recent residency with the Backroom Foundation in London, are made with two identical images – one printed on photographic paper and the other on delicate translucent Japanese paper. The loosely attached layers create a depth and dimensionality, conjuring with their performative quality the true grandeur of London planes with their majestic trunks and gestural branches. Appreciated for their resilience to urban conditions and pollution, London planes are a celebrated part of the city’s landscape.
The sky is usually viewed in reference to ground, water or vegetation, but Tuori's Sky series concentrates solely on the sky as a subject in its own right. The artist again layers black and white and colour photographs, giving some more prominence while others are only vaguely suggested, resulting in images that seems as if on the border of painting and photography and allow the viewer total immersion in skyscapes of great depth and luminosity. In the small-scale series, Cloud, Tuori has photographed a single cloud moving across the sky, taking numerous shots over a short period of time. The ephemeral nature of the moment shimmers in the work, the light fades into immateriality, slips into blackness, and flashes into its opposite. The Clouds are displayed individually in drifting clusters, creating the impression that the images are dissolving into the sky.
In a process akin to those of the Forest and Sky series, Tuori photographs the flowers and pad of the Water Lilies Tuori in lakes and ponds over an extended period of time. The ensuing works are multi-layered images, each taken at different times. In some the same layer might be present more than once; in black and white, in colour, sometimes inverted into negative. The image becomes abstracted, no longer a specific record of the original lake and water lilies, but more the essence and memory of the place.
A major monograph Santeri Tuori, Time Is No Longer Round was published by Hatje Cantz, 2020. A retrospective exhibition, Santeri Tuori, Photography and Video Works, was held at the Serlachius Museum, Gosta, 2022. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at Fotografiska in New York, Stockholm and Tallinn; Serlachius Museum Gösta, Mänttä; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Schlassgaart, Luxembourg; Kunsthalle, Helsinki; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and Beraro Museum, Lisbon. Tuori’s works have been acquired by several major collections, including EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art; Serlachius Museum, Gosta; Finnish Museum of Photography, Helskinki; FRAC Haute-Normandie; Malmö Art Museum, Sweden and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki.