Recent tourist experiments taken from the G20 protests London – a good way to sightsee a city.  I am working towards coming up with a semi-random style of mixed media (photography / painting with light) to master a style I want to develop more into large-size painting later on.  Whenever I have time to experiment as I am writing quite actively again…

Some new experimental photos / mixed media work done from different scenes from London.   A style under experimentation … these were taken during the recent Gaza protests where I was trying to capture some of the energies using a quasi-random photo-compositing technique I have been developing. The plan is to use this technique for a full series in the next few months where the end result of these ‘mixules’ would be to paint these large size as the final outcome of the many “machines” in between…

Some posters I did for the series of talks and seminars with film makers and speakers we hosted at SOAS with our media collective SACREDMEDIACOW. The aim of these was to make them as simply as possible as they had to be photocopied black and white. The exception is the conference poster that I made in color. No conscious Bauhaus functionalism and minimalism here … just low budgets.

I was interested here in playing with the juxtaposition of color – and especially lack of it – that characterize the winter months hereparts of the world. Everytime I come to Finland from elsebouts in dead winter, the atmosphere somehow reminds me of a scene from some akikaurismaki-like film scene where people quietly sip coffee and smoke cigarettes, say, at some faraway 24-hour highway truck stop. Nothing is said. Nothing stirs. The dimly-flickering neonlights set a stagnant pace where everything is out of sync with time, timeless, atemporal – something that also seems to characterize the dark and colorless days of december here. Tiring yet beautiful in some odd melancholic existential way.

A relative died.  He had suffered schizophrenia for years and finally ended up killing himselves at the age of 42.  The funeral was thus small and consisted of mostly the closest friends and family.  I tried to capture some of the somber mood of the funeral with its disctinctly stoic and minimalistic Northern Christian traditions and expression of emotion and grief.