ENG
Laura Kopio: Emma Eats Bread and Butter
The starting point of Laura Kopio’s (b.1981) artistic practice is the study of problems related to power and violence as philosophical questions, through painting. In her works, she reflects on the invisible suffering and social problems caused by violence, as well as questions related to history and remembrance from the perspective of power. Her work focuses on exploring and dismantling the forms, mechanisms, rituals and subtle connections of power relations in society. She graduated as a visual artist from the Turku Art Academy and studied art history and philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä.
Emma Eats Bread and Butter consists of works of various sizes, mainly painted on canvas in oil.
In my artistic work, I examine power and its different forms, as well as the human suffering caused by them. The theme that sustains the whole is crystallized in the thinking of the German thinker and composer Theodor Adorno, and it can be summed up in the phrase ”The condition of all truth is the need to give a voice to suffering.” In Adorno, as a thinker, I am fascinated not only by his ideas, but also by his ability to write about art in a way that makes visible the historical conditions in which the key philosophers and aesthetes of this century wrote. His thinking also embodies a broader intellectual mission, at a time when the utopian horizons of modernity have disappeared.
The exhibition as a whole is an overview of the role from the point of view of structure: humanity as womanhood in its many forms, in a world where the role as a human being is still something that someone other than a woman or someone who defines herself as a woman defines or wants to define. What are we as women, what are we allowed to be, to whom, how much and in what way?
In my works, gender is emphasized especially as a class issue. Through roles, the topic also appears as a societal and social position, in how othered roles (not roles chosen through gender) are still stigmatized and given from above. Through or in the form of the characters depicted in my works, I reflect on the oppressive structure hidden in class society, which our capitalist system supports, for example, in the form of economic inequality and violent treatment of women, both on a concrete and structural level. Being human appears in the form of power relations in society and, through the oppressive structure that this causes, as a broader social question, the forms, mechanisms and rituals of which I reflect on in my works.
Through my paintings, I try to highlight hidden broader manifestations of power, as well as the problems arising from these forms of power. I have tried to highlight the positions associated with women and issues related to history and the present from the point of view of an oppressive structure. We live in a world where weakness, lack of livelihood and failure are seen as individual choices. Erasing class differences into individual choices is society’s way of hiding the problems of the disadvantaged from our eyes.
My ever-changing and occasionally disintegrating effort is to portray the conflict of human nature in the riptides of pressures built between private and shared social reality.
