Bonniers Konsthall

The film is shot in a zoo. Apart from a woman photographer and the caged animals that she looks at and photographs, the zoo is deserted. The encounter between the woman and the setting generates a tension that is expressed in an interplay of looking. The lone woman’s photographic gaze is met in all directions by animal gazes. Paradoxically, this woman moving at liberty seems to end up on the losing end of a power game that increasingly reflects a broader context.

An intense underwater-rugby match is being fought out in parallel with the events at the zoo. The images focus on the violent, emphatically masculine, claustrophobic aspects of the sport. The moves seem to follow the laws of nature. The interrelationship between the two fields of action in Zoo is not immediately obvious. Is the underwater battle in the woman’s mind, is it actually taking place, or is it a projection of a heightened emotional state?

Zoo has various links with Tykkä’s earlier films, which similarly investigate crucial moments in women’s experience. Tykkä situates the events in inner space, but with the outer environment and the film music taking the leading roles. She likes to play with the conventions of the classic Hollywood film, as in Lasso (2000) and Thriller (2001). In Zoo it is primarily the smartly dressed blonde heroine, the condensed editing and the dramatic music that summon echoes of film history, and especially of Alfred Hitchcock.

Tykkä graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2003 and works with film, video and photography. Her works are a regular feature at exhibitions and film festivals all over the world. In Sweden she has shown at Tensta Konsthall in 2003, and elsewhere. Zoo won the Arte Short Film Award at the 22nd Hamburg International Short Film Festival in 2006. Salla Tykkä lives and works in Helsinki.

Zoo, 2006, film. Courtesy Salla Tykkä & Yvon Lambert Paris, New York.

Thanks you to the Finnish Institute and Frame.

Bonniers Konsthall
April 4 – June 17, 2007