This series by Aarne and Arja Jämsä is shaped by a long-standing coexistence—a life that serves simultaneously as material, subject, and method. In their works, the personal becomes a shared imagery in which time, the body, and memory are in constant motion.

The ensemble presented in Venice at Palazzo Mora (first floor, room 08) consists of works drawn on rice paper, based on earlier colored pieces. The serial mode of presentation emphasizes repetition, variation, and temporal layering: the same image returns, but transformed.

The series is built on a self-reflective dialogue between the artist couple. The images repeatedly explore the relationship between two people—closeness, wear, humor, and vulnerability. The works form a kind of visual diary in which identity is not fixed but continuously negotiated.

The images returning to youth address memory and its uncertainty. They are not documents but interpretations—images of what is remembered, and what is perhaps imagined to be remembered. The distance of time is visible in the line and in the delicate shared presence of the images.

In this series, the image is built in layers: an image within an image, a trace within another trace. “Tattooed” refers to permanence—to the way images attach themselves to the body and the mind. At the same time, the series asks whether any image can ever be final, or whether everything exists within a historical continuum.

The dark-toned works form the quieter and more intense core of the exhibition. “Vessels” refers both to concrete forms and to the body as a container—where experiences, time, and meanings accumulate. In these works, the atmosphere condenses, and the line takes on an almost sculptural weight.

This series, executed on plywood, brings physicality and material contrast to the whole. “Carnival” refers to masks, roles, and performance—to how identity is also constructed through display. There is a carnivalesque energy in the works: did the animals tame us?

In the Venice exhibition, rice paper serves as a key medium: it makes the images translucent, temporal, and fragile.

Color has receded, but the trace remains.

All of this has happened to us, and that is why it is here.