Reality in the making

Early in his career, Ville Lenkkeri studied film, and film remains a strong influence. In one series titled Movies, the young Helsinki School photographer (born in 1972) investigated the relationship between cinema and photography; his latest, The World As We Know It, employs a cinematic strategy. Here, he photographs paintings and scenes-within-a-scene, from murals in waiting rooms to three-dimensional dioramas in natural science museums, trompe-l'oeil art in settings he describes as "public places to which people do not have intimate relationships, but still a relationship...often the people in pictures have worked in these places for a long time." The presence of such a figure, a museum guard or a visitor, heightens the ambivalence the artist is looking for, keeping readers in the disturbing, unfocused zone between reality and fiction.