The Image of a Woman explores how women are represented in visual culture and how artificial intelligence participates in reproducing and reshaping those representations.

The series grew from my exploration of historical Finnish photographs and from a question about what kinds of female presence images allow us to see. Using photography, archival references and generative AI, I create fictional images that resemble fragments of a collective photographic memory while never having existed as photographs.

The women in these works are often quiet, melancholic, ordinary, resting or absorbed in their own worlds. The series questions the visual conventions through which female agency and empowerment are commonly made visible. Confidence, control, glamour and performative self-assurance have become familiar signs of the empowered woman in contemporary visual culture. My work asks whether a woman can simply exist within an image without having to perform these qualities in order to be perceived as autonomous.

In the context of the billboard, this question takes on another dimension. Advertising and public visual culture are built around capturing attention. By placing women in this space who do not necessarily address the viewer, perform for the viewer or sell an aspiration, the works propose another kind of presence: one that does not need to announce its strength in order to occupy public space.

Names:
Strong Together, 2024
Fishers II, 2024
Rest, 2024