Heli Ryhänen. Unscharf / out of the blur

Heli Ryhänen (b. 1971), whom the Kunsthalle Helsinki has described as one of the four "most interesting names in Finnish contemporary sculpture," creates constellations of figures that resemble tableaux vivants, arranging her more or less life-sized puppets in situations that are as commonplace as they are existential.
The puppet or marionette is a lump of earth, a homunculus, a golem, a cyborg, a surrogate or idol. As we play with the puppet and its surreal possibilities, it beckons us to walk the fine line between consciousness and dream.
Our relations with the puppet (i.e., Heli Ryhänen's figures) harbor the seed of the disturbing and the uncanny. In light of the virtuality of a digital (gaming) world that is forcefully reshaping many areas of our lives and enables us to conceive our own bodies as potentially capable of comprehensive modification, the uncanny is not as far removed from reality as we may sometimes prefer to believe.