The key themes in Finnish artist Tea Mäkipää’s photographs, films, objects, installations, live actions and performances are the survival tactics and social behaviour of both individuals and the human species as a whole in cohabitating with other species. The starting point for Mäkipää’s artistic research is often her own behaviour in terms of basic actions such as the search for food, shelter and a gregarious life, or basic issues such as our ecological, social or ethical responsibility. These questions are put in relation to each other but also to other, strange or disconcerting forms of existence or behaviour in a direct and unadulterated fashion. In doing so, Tea Mäkipää also addresses the characteristics, changes and phenomena of human needs in a state of crisis or emergency, where the conventions of social life are questioned or invalidated. It is a sure guess that Tea Mäkipää’s consistent artistic approach of the grey zones between nature and technology, life as a hermit and expanding urbanism, hope and fear, or between the questionable logic of a short-sighted spiral of consumption and progress poised to relentlessly improve life conditions, and the consequently ever more real dystopia, is nurtured by her Finnish origins.

(Frank Motz)