Solo Exhibitions
Anatomical Venus
Valokuvakeskus Peri, Turku 23.2-24.3.2024
Galleri A, Kuopio, 9.9-6.11.2022
Galleria Rajatila, Tampere 13.-30.8.2022
Yö Galleria, Helsinki 2-19.9.2021
This exhibition is an exploration of the strict gender roles embedded within historical anatomical imagery through the anatomical Venus, a Venus-like life-size wax figure from the 18th century. Johanna Naukkarinen uses photography, digital drawing, and collage to examine this phenomenon intersecting the history of art and medicine. To showcase the absurdity of gender roles in the history of anatomy, she brings together various imageries from different contexts in an analytical and playful way.
The anatomical Venus wax figures were first made in Italy during the 18th century. These figures were used for teaching anatomy to the general public and were moulded into the form inspired by the portrayal of Venus in the visual arts. They were decorated with pearls, long human hair, and eyelashes. The figures were placed to lie on silk, with exposed guts and sensuous expressions on their faces. The beauty of the Venuses was meant to distract people from thinking about death while learning anatomy.
As a medical object the anatomical Venus reflects the blatant power relations in the history of medicine. The exhibition widens to trace the common pictorial language of visual arts and the history of medicine. Historical anatomical imagery was meant to take people to the core of humanity, but to the bodies assigned as female they leave only the role of a passive nude painting.
The photography series Body Worlds: The Anatomical Venus (with Tiia Kasurinen) reimagines the Body Worlds exhibition by putting the anatomical Venus into poses that only bodies assigned as male were allowed to take in the history of art and medicine. The series is made in collaboration with dance artist Tiia Kasurinen.
The two sets of works Studies on Science and the Feminine Figure and Lying Down trace the passive characters similar to the anatomical Venus common in the various eras and contexts. The photography series They Used to Wear Pearls examines the combination of beauty and the grotesque by using the embellishments from the anatomical Venus on contemporary neutral anatomical models.
This exhibition has been supported by the Alfred Kordelin Foundation, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Turku Art Society and Turku cultural board.
The contemporary anatomical has been photographed in Turku Vocational Institute and the real anatomical Venus has been photographed in Palazzo Poggi Museum in Bologna.
Museum of Hysteria
Kouta Galleria, Kouvola 30.6-26.7.2020
Galleria Huuto, Helsinki 10.1-2.2.2020
The works featured in the Museum of Hysteria exhibition examine a 19th century medical phenomenon, hysteria, through photography, an image montage, digital drawing and a sculptural installation. Hysteria was a medical phenomenon that brought together a variety of symptoms, mainly affecting women, into an illness concept that inspired both science and art and was used for maintaining strict gender norms. Johanna Naukkarinen examines the images of hysteria through the perspective of scientific gaze and draws a parallel between hysteria images and contemporary images of women.
The works play with the gendered power structures of the gaze and the presence of the scientific gaze in non-scientific images. At the core of the works are drawings created in connection with examinations at the 19th century Parisian hospital La Salpêtrière, used for categorizing the symptoms of hysteria and the women suffering from these symptoms. Naukkarinen uses hysteria as a mirror for more modern imageries and, through them, asks questions about the unchanging imageries of women.
The installation Causes of Hysteria (2019) illustrates, in the form of small crystal sculptures, those everyday reasons that were believed to drive women to hysteria in the 19th century and make them the objects of medical gaze. The series Studies on Science and the Feminine Figure (2015–2019) draws a parallel between historical drawings and real commercial images of women, in the form of fictitious study boards.
The name Museum of Hysteria refers to the exhibition as if it was a collection of hysteria artifacts in a museum. It also refers to a real museum-like space that, as part of the Salpêtrière hysteria hospital, featured a collection of works portraying hysterical women. Created using different artistic methods, the works were showcased to people visiting the hospital. Naukkarinen’s works play with scientific esthetics, yet seeking to reduce and ironize the charm of hysteria.
The exhibition has been supported by the Turku Cultural Committee and Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
B-galleria, Turku 17.4.-19.5. 2019
Meet Augustine presents a new set of works of Johanna Naukkarinen. The exhibition focuses on scientific gaze and the history and power relations of western image culture. The name of the exhibition is a hybrid of two important themes of Naukkarinen’s artistic practise. Augustine was the most famous hysteric of the 19th century and the face of the hysteria imagery. The exhibition invites the viewer to meet her like the “has-been” clothing brand American Apparel’s notorious ads invite to meet their models.
Convulsions, poses and the ways that the subjects of the images are being described are the central observations in the artworks where Naukkarinen reflects and speculates the presence of the scientific gaze in everyday images.
With her playful works Naukkarinen comments the gender power relations by bringing together the historical and contemporary imageries of women. Meet Augustine presents works that have taken their form in photomontages, crystal sculptures and digital drawings. The uniting element between the pieces are the hysteria images made in 19th century Paris. These images link together medical history and art history. Even though Naukkarinen has a fine art photography degree from Turku Arts Academy, she has widened her practise from photography to other mediums. The inspiration behind her work still often focuses on criticising and researching the photographic image culture.
The series Teaching Photography with Hysterics (2019) aims to break the “neutrality” of how the old camera guidebooks present women as the main subjects of photography. In the series Naukkarinen replaces the women in the guide drawings with 19th century drawings of hysterics. With small crystal sculptures the installation series Causes of Hysteria (2019) illustrates the everyday delights that were believed to cause women hysteria in the 19th century and make them objects of science and surveillance.
Naukkarinen exhibited her graduation exhibition, Grand Hysteria, in Turku Art Museum Studio in spring 2016. It also addressed the image culture of hysteria and presented her on-going working method: the comparison between similarities of the 19th century hysteria images and the contemporary fashion images. In the summer 2018 Naukkarinen finished her MA degree in the media studies department of Turku University and dove into the deeper meanings of the topic mentioned above in her master’s thesis The Gender Power Relations of Photographic Gaze in the 19th Century Hysteria Images and American Apparel Ads.
With her works Naukkarinen references to the to the structures of the history of art and photography, but she also trifles and speculates with the surprising possibilities of the emergence of scientific gaze in the western image culture.
The exhibition has been supported by the Turku Cultural Committee.
Suuri Hysteria / Grand Hysteria
Turku Art Museum Studio 1.4-8.5.2016
Every spring the Turku Art Museum presents in its Studio gallery a show by a visual artist graduating from the Turku Arts Academy. This year the featured artist is Johanna Naukkarinen (b. 1988), whose graduation show explores hysteria and its visual legacy through photography and video.
Hysteria emerged as a prominent medical phenomenon in the 19th century, and it became an umbrella condition for many physical and mental symptoms besetting women in particular. At the same time it was also a cultural construction through which the woman was defined as the weaker sex and through which her experiences were suppressed and medicalised by appealing to hysteria. By the 20th century hysteria had been shown to be a medical fallacy, and people started to examine its many manifestations from new perspectives. Yet it had left an indelible mark on European culture and art.
Photography was an important tool in the study of the physical symptoms of hysteria. Female patients were photographed in barely concealing hospital garb in a hospital studio, and the most popular hysterics were able to switch from one spasm to the next in time with the clicking of the shutter, just like fashion models. Naukkarinen takes this peculiar confluence of hysteria and photography as the starting point of her show, juxtaposing historical imageries with contemporary photographic expression.
Grand Hysteria spotlights the structures of gazing and being the object of the gaze, along with the power dynamics associated with the visual representation of women in particular. Works in the Grand Movements series analyse the parallels between fashion imagery and images of hysteria by comparing poses in fashion photography with photographs of hysterical cramps. The structures of the gaze in advertising photography take on a new perspective when the uncomfortable poses of fashion models are juxtaposed with pictures taken in the context of illness. One facet of the backstory of Naukkarinen’s video is the contention that people suffering from hysteria would have been imposters who faked their symptoms in order to get attention. The video shows five people trying to imitate the extreme physical symptom of hysteria, the ‘grand movement’ called arc-en-ciel, a spasm in which the patient arches her back into a painful curve.