Anni Leppälä (born 1981, Helsinki, Finland) studied at the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Helsinki, and was chosen as Finland's Young Artist of the Year in 2010.
Her work explores the relationship between the past and present. It is a visual expanse that covers a multitude of landscapes, surfaces and enclosed spaces. Like stylized postcards or snapshots, her works take on an aura of frozen time, recording both fleeting moments and the small glimpses of larger tales from which they are taken. She draws from memories, loss, longing and early adolescence, seeking an experience of connection and closeness but also the act of recognizing something vaguely familiar. Things are often veiled, hidden or turning away, but are in their own sphere of intense, remote closeness. Photographs transform their subjects and evoke a feeling of sudden recognition that is not visible on the surface. Leppälä is trying to trace those translucent paths into the unseen and invisible - to seek an inner experience which only the images can convey.
'For me photographs are like fixed points in the process of change and alteration, they give a chance of observing and allow the viewer to step closer. One can gather trust and confidence in recognizing them but simultaneously photographs have another kind of nature; a side turning towards the invisible and the unidentified. What finally becomes recognized can be something "outside" of the image, something out of sight - something imperceptible. In this momentary experience something is revealed which is not something "that-has-been" but rather something that exists and is present here and now'. (Anni Leppälä)