Marko Vuokola

Marko Vuokola (born 1967) is a Finnish conceptual artist. He lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.

Marko Vuokola was born in Toijala, Finland as the youngest son of photographer Aimo Vuokola and Tuula Vuokola. He studied at the Department of Sculpture at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki from 1987 and received a BA in 1991, followed by studies in Media Arts at AKI, De Academie voor Kunst en Industrie in Enschede, the Netherlands 1991-92. He graduated with an MA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2001.

Vuokola works across a wide variety of media and materials, departing often from a conceptual exploration of issues relating to time and space. Many works, particularly in his collaborations in the OLO collective (together with Pasi Eerik Karjula), have a strongly installational and site-related character. Despite his training as a sculptor, much of his artistic oeuvre is based on photography, video or computer animation. He is often mentioned as a photographer, although it is more proper to describe his work as based on ideas just as much as on materials. His works often also explore the optical and other aspects of his artistic media, like the camera or the video projector.

During the summer of 1995, Vuokola spent five weeks in remote Palsinoja in the Finnish Lapland digging for gold. The 4 grams of gold that he collected were stretched into a thin thread only 0,12 mm thick and approximately 7 m long. The work deals with time just as much as with the precious material, and also with the concepts of sculpture and visuality in art. The thread can hardly be seen when stretched across a wall, while it represents a considerable amount of physical work. The work was exhibited at Henry Moore institute, Leeds, in 1996 and later acquired by Kiasma, the Finnish national museum of contemporary art.

In 2001 Vuokola started up the series of works that he is most known for, The Seventh Wave. In these photographic diptychs, each panel depicts what might seem an identical motive. The difference between the images can be described in terms of time, as an unknown amount of time has passed between the two exposures. The difference is also a matter of space and material, as the physical and light circumstances have changed, even if these differences might be very small. The camera remains in the same position during these exposures. Many of these works have been shot outdoors, but this does not mean it is a series of landscape images, as several interiors and even seemingly abstract motives are included in the series. The Seventh Wave includes landscapes from Finland, park views from the Versailles of Louis XIV, the surroundings of Donald Judd’s Marfa in Texas, interiors and exteriors from Hong Kong, Great Barrier Island in New Zealand, seascapes from Vietnam, a car vendor’s display room and the artist’s home and neighbourhood. The title of the series comes from the popular belief, that on sea, the seventh wave tends to be the largest.

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