About "European Eyes on Japan":
Launched in 1999, the European Eyes on Japan / Japan Today photography project has brought engaging photographers from various countries of Europe to Japan to explore contemporary Japan through their work. To date, 51 such European photographers have visited to capture the 32 prefectures of Japan in their own ways. For this 13th exhibition of the project, Kalle Kataila and Krista Mölder visited the Akita Prefecture in 2010-2011.

For this thirteenth volume of European Eyes on Japan, two photographers assembled an exclusive photographic portrait of Akita Prefecture. Shooting took place in totally opposite seasons: December amid record-breaking snowfall, and in blazing July sunshine.

Despite consulting with Krista to determine the timing of her Japanese sojourn based on past snowfall, in an effort if possible to avoid what she described as predictably photogenic snowscapes, snow fell without letup from the very day she set foot in Akita. I was concerned that the shoot might become difficult, but equally intrigued to see what Mölder would then turn her gaze on in Akita. It wasn’t that her work, found among that of several Estonian photographers, had initially made a powerful impression. But I did find myself drawn to a certain tranquil charm that slowly seeped into the consciousness, and burned itself irrevocably on the mind. Landmarks, produced during a period of study in the UK, is – in line with one critic’s description of her work as ‘subjective cartography’* – a tale of the world and ‘the personal’, what’s more, one consisting not of data captured by Google Earth, but woven by the photographer with each of her own steps on the land. Yet the result is never too lyrical, the camera acting more as a gauge for identifying Mölder’s own standpoint. One sensed a cautious distancing from herself and the subject, to avoid drowning in acute sensitivity, and a persistent belief in expressing herself in an original visual language.


Krista Mölder's work fromt 'European Eyes on Japan' series

What she arrived at through her Akita photo shoot was the concept of ‘ma’. On her visits to ordinary houses, to the samurai villas of Kakunodate, to Japan’s oldest wooden playhouse in Kosakamachi, which enjoyed its heyday in the years of mining there, and several buildings by Seiichi Shirai still standing in Akita, his exiled home, her sensibilities did not fail to register peculiarly Japanese ways of viewing time and space. Hopefully viewers will be able to enjoy the photographer’s locus of dialogue overlapping with each space.

The second photographer, Kalle Kataila, headed for Akita in early July, with summer in the air. Getting behind the wheel personally, he embarked on an exhaustive shooting schedule centred on the north of the prefecture from Oga on the Japan Sea Coast, to Hachimantai in the Mountains. The idea of commissioning a photographer whose work is dominated by “landscapes” arose not only from a desire for contrast with Krista Mölder’s work, and to capture the majesty of Akita’s natural surroundings. To a large extent it was due to the emergence of a personal uneasiness that did not quite equate to questioning – confronted by the devastating scenes witnessed since March 11 – of what exactly were the ‘landscapes’ previously captured by photographers, showing the power of nature, symbols of human ambition and destructive capability, mirroring contemporary society, and occasionally acting as a receptacle for the photographer’s emotions. The figures appearing in Kalle’s works simply linger unobtrusively amid the grandeur of nature, or manmade urban landscape. It is never clear what they are looking at, or thinking. In their rear views, occasionally ill at ease, exuding a sense of loneliness even, reminiscent of the way people from time immemorial have gazed at the landscape and been inspired and awed, one senses a whiff of something like hope, hope for some sort of rapport between landscape and mankind. In Kataila’s photos, images from viewing platforms and telescopes are inserted effectively to act as catalysts for observing the universal relationship between landscape, human, and the act of looking.

About the gallery:
Temnikova & Kasela gallery is located in Tallinn and is based on partnership of gallerist Olga Temnikova and contemporary culture promoter Indrek Kasela. The cooperation of Kasela and Temnikova came out of necessity of creating new type of art institution, with inclination to break out of dysfunctional academic gallery image and of course go on with representing and introducing established and emerging authors from Baltic region and beyond. The gallery follows participative art trends, creating new rituals for perception of contemporary art through organizing interdisciplinary dynamic events, optimizing international idea circulation.