Point of View: Heli Rekula

Heli Rekula: The Triptych Altarpiece from the series Pilgrimage (1996)

A young woman with a bullet hole in her forehead. Usually the next question is: who shot her? But the mystery in Heli Rekula’s triptych The Altarpiece seems more complicated. The woman, with a supermodel figure, is alive, and a white rabbit sits by her. Enigmatic black-and-white rocks tower on either side. What religion is practised in front of this altar? There are no clear clues for understanding The Altarpiece, only complex hints. The question about the shooter is momentarily forgotten.

Today’s Saints

The female body, its innocence and losing that innocence are central in Rekula’s work, and that is also the case with The Altarpiece. In front of it, one can contemplate not religion, but those beliefs and meanings that guide beings saturated with culture, us humans. The Altarpiece is a curious mixture of Christian symbolism and the aesthetics of advertisements. The woman, hired from a model agency, fulfils the criteria of modern models: she is young and thin, her skin is pale, nose straight, and lips full. ”Models are today’s saints,” says Rekula. Posing for a camera is the model’s job, but this time something is not quite right, the atmosphere differs from that of fashion magazines and billboards. Perhaps that is due to Rekula’s assignment. ”Just stand there, don’t pose,” Rekula says were her instructions to the experienced model. ”I wanted to see what happens when one is not posing.”

The motifs of The Altarpiece, a woman and a landscape, are recurrent in Rekula’s work. Women in photographs and videos repeatedly raise the question of the cultural beliefs associated with woman, which control her life both from the inside and outside. Concealed, perhaps even forbidden, feelings associated with female aggression, sexuality, and eating disorders surface. With her works, Rekula has made room for female failure, cruelty, and anger, but her way of presenting the question of the ”nature” of the cultural woman remains open and seems free from the usual moralising tone. At the same time, Rekula has asked important questions through her works. Who controls the female body? And where are the boundaries of the body? These same questions can be asked in front of the series Pilgrimage.

Christian symbols

Rekula says she immersed herself in studying old visual art and its symbols when she was making the Pilgrimage series. ”I studied Renaissance art and all kinds of paintings: saints, Virgin Marys, Jesuses and icons, they all fascinated me.” The triptych form of The Triptych Altarpiece and its details hark back to paintings seen by Rekula. Examples include a child-like white undergarment to signify innocence and a bullet hole in the head, which refers to stigmas, although other works in the series, repeating the same motif, are more direct: a girl shows off her pierced, bloody hands in a gesture familiar from Christian imagery. One does not need to search far for the association. The fair model – more than a girl but not yet a woman – is a kind of an innocent victim, bound by the demand for the perfect control of the body.

The rabbit in The Altarpiece also comes from paintings seen by Rekula. ”Usually images full of Christian symbolism contain a white lamb, but I also saw a white rabbit somewhere.” The rabbit fascinated Rekula so much that she placed it in The Altarpiece. ”Naturally the rabbit in this context symbolises fertility and sexuality.” Rekula finds the dynamism between the girl and the rabbit interesting and sees the girl’s attitude towards the rabbit as protective on the one hand and rejecting on the other.

Carnal nature

Although the dynamism between nature and culture is a common subject in contemporary art, sometimes repeated ad nauseam, Rekula’s The Altarpiece seems to offer an original, even mystical, point of view. The whole leads one’s thoughts to different times and places, or perhaps states of mind rather than real places or a certain point in time.

Black-and-white images of rocks framing the innocent girl-woman both clarify and confuse the whole. The thoughts of the viewer are not necessarily captured by anything special, but numerous simultaneous interpretations compete with each other. The images on the sides are necessary so that the altarpiece would be formally valid, a traditional triptych. On the other hand, the massive rocks are ideal for highlighting the girl’s fragility. They emphasise the difference between a living being and things of the mineral kingdom, and place the young woman in the middle of untouched nature… ”The rocks resemble flesh, they emphasise the theme of the carnal nature and self-denial, while on the other hand, they represent asceticism and take one’s thoughts to Jesus’ time in the mountains and the Sermon on the Mount, for instance,” says Rekula.

The shooter is revealed?

Rekula confuses the viewer even more by offering a new clue to the bloody bullet hole in the middle of the girl’s forehead. It can be found on the video belonging to the series Pilgrimage, in which a narrator with a child’s voice says: ”And I shoot you with a golden bullet and the someone, the marksman, killer, me, or someone else stood in the middle of a day with no ending. And then shot. And I felt as if I had been shot in the forehead. And shot from the inside. I'm trying to describe something I don't know how to describe. At least not in facts. […] What if God hates Himself. Did I already say that I'm trying to describe something I don't know how to describe, at least, not in facts? The bullet-hole is like any other opening in the body, only its task is longing, but longing for what?”

Minna Raitmaa

Heli Rekula graduated from the Department of Photography in Lahti Institute of Design in 1991. In addition to photographs, she employs video and film and combinations of these as her expressive media. Rekula often works on loose themes, which she explores from different points of view by changing the order of the works and displaying them in different combinations as parts of an installation. The transitions from one theme to another are gradual and intertwined. Rekula’s triptych The Altarpiece is part of the theme of Pilgrimage, which was displayed for the first time in an exhibition of Nordic contemporary art in Copenhagen in 1996. Since then, Rekula has presented different versions of the series, the latest being in the Venice Biennale in 2001. In addition to The Altarpiece, the series Pilgrimage includes smaller photographs, reiterating the same female image (icons) and a video.

Sources:
Interview with Heli Rekula 21 December 2001
An article by Arja Elovirta in the catalogue Heli Rekula – Paradise lost (1998)
Text by Kari Hukkila in Heli Rekula’s video Pilgrimage (1996)

Quote translated by Hildi Hawkins