Photographic Centre Peri’s Kilta Gallery: Marko Karo – Closed System – Open Ground

Marko Karo’s exhibition Closed System – Open Ground examines a mode of life based on the exploitation of natural resources and human labour from the viewpoint of an imagined future. Built around two immersive video works, the exhibition opens a passage into two worlds that are elemental opposites yet deeply intertwined. From both the scorching desert sands and the depths of an all-encompassing sea emerge the structures of large-scale extraction, forced labour and imprisonment: the remains of cultures lost in time. Through the fragmented travel diaries of the narrators, the works unfold as archaeological investigations, asking what kinds of societies lie behind these remains.

Mirage (2026) is a single-channel video work exploring the desert as an archive that transcends human dimensions. The slowly vanishing ruins of mining towns bear tangible witness to a culture that entwines production and control, the disciplining of lands, and of the human body, and the extraction of both natural resources and freedom. Mirage (2026) was filmed in Chile’s Atacama Desert, for example, in the abandoned mining settlements that fueled the demands of the First World War.

In Sea Change (2021), forests petrified to the seabed, endless rows of brick walls, and buildings eroded into heaps of stone betray the ruins of a prison at the edge of an open-pit mine. The penal system, often taken for granted as a mundane necessity, appears as an ancient relic shaped by entropy, a future fossil. Sea Change (2021) was filmed in a former open-pit mine now filled with groundwater, a site that once formed part of the Soviet Gulag prison camp network.

Against this backdrop, Closed System – Open Ground explores the fragile and imaginary nature of even the most fundamental structures undepinning our societies. The exhibition continues Marko Karo’s recent artistic practice, which can be described as a form of speculative visual archaeology. By blending different temporalities as well as genres of moving images (documentary and science fiction), Karo investigates possible futures while raising fundamental questions about the temporality and visuality of violence, and about the forces impacting our ways of being together.

Alongside the two video works, the exhibition includes photographs, objects and geological materials. All works have been created without the use of artificial intelligence or digital image manipulation.

Marko Karo is a Helsinki-based visual artist working with photography and the moving image. His practice often engages with the material remains and histories of conflicts and systems of power. Bringing together different modes of photography and image-making, Karo combines documentary strategies with speculative forms of visual narration to explore the relationship between history, landscape and ideology.

At the core of his work lies an investigation into the violence embedded in contemporary ways of life and the structures that sustain them, viewed from both historical perspectives and imagined futures. Throughout his practice, the relationship between images and violence remains a recurring concern, shaping his exploration of how societies construct, conceal and legitimise forms of domination, exclusion and control.

Karo’s work has been presented in numerous exhibitions in Finland and internationally. He has taught extensively at Finnish art universities, most recently as a Lecturer in the ViCCA Master’s Programme at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture. He studied photography at the former University of Art and Design Helsinki, law at the University of Turku, and critical theory at Birkbeck, University of London.

Opening on Thursday, August 13th, 5-10pm.

Guided tour on Sunday, September 20th, 1pm.