'Infinite Cycle/Nothing Beyond' by Camilla Edström Ödemark at Sinne, Helsinki

Sinne is happy to start the New Year with an exhibition by Camilla Edström Ödemark. She is originally from Åland and lives and works in Malmö, Sweden. Her art employs installations, sculpture and the moving image. At the core of Edström Ödemark’s work is an interest in questions of identity, alienation and capitalism. She searches popular culture and myths for traces and structures that create and maintain western identity. The “Infinite Circle/Nothing Beyond" exhibition consists of videos and sculptures that use the myth of Narcissus as a point of entry. The themes of this new series of works centre on our self-image, worldview and boundaries.

Here Edström Ödemark highlights a phenomenon that accompanies, guides and shapes us today. Algorithms are sets of instructions derived from mathematics and used as a tool for achieving various kinds of results. Today, the algorithm is an actor operating behind the scenes deep inside our web-connected everyday lives, code created to study our behaviour, to categorize us, and to filter out a reality that it is presumed we want to interact with. Often behind the algorithms is an economic or political interest. They are a fantastic tool for anyone who wants to gather information and influence large groups of people. At the same time, algorithms generate feedback on social media, an echo chamber that confirms and reinforces the individual’s worldview and generates misconceptions and self-centeredness. In several of her works Edström Ödemark focuses on the feedback in these filter bubbles, by using mirrors, dried plants, mobile telephones, selfie sticks cast in silicon, and data cables, together with images and video material taken from the internet. Her collage-like sculptural works become a kind of extension of these codes, with which they can extend out into space. The moving-image material in the exhibition has been acquired from various internet sources: viral video clips, YouTube tutorials, and so on. The videowork "Transit" continues these same themes, but views national borders and passages through and over them as identity-confirming mechanisms.

— Markus Åström