At the kitchen table

Mother didn’t know that I had… I didn’t know that I had… My sister didn’t know that I had… I didn’t know that she had… She didn’t know that she had… I didn’t know that you had… You didn’t know that they had…

Leena Holmström’s exhibition At the Kitchen Table, presented in the Lobby Gallery of Photo North – Northern Photographic Centre, explores silence and the things left unspoken. The exhibition consists of performative and staged self-portraits in which the artist addresses memories and traumas held in the body and mind that resurfaced following the death of her father—memories of humiliation and an oppressive atmosphere.

Through constructed photography, staging, and digital image manipulation, Holmström gives visual form to invisible emotional memories. The exhibition presents a series of eight works, At the Kitchen Table, created between 2022 and 2023. The works focus on different psychophysical states and conflicting emotions arising from memories formed around the kitchen table of the artist’s childhood home. In Stroker (2022), a person who has lost her way in life strokes a red thread into her hair. Internalised roles and beliefs sustain negative emotional experiences, as in Pseudohelper (2022), in which the figure is unable to help herself.