Events/Openings

Gallery TAIK is highly pleased to present Mikko Rikala’s first solo exhibition in Berlin: Towards Nothing.

“What are the possibilities of Man to observe and understand the world beyond the rational mind?” This is the essential question Mikko Rikala seeks to instantiate through his photographic work. Epistemological by nature, Rikala’s enquiry examines the tension between “seeing”, equatable with the realm of physics and its sizeable dimensions as a form of rational knowledge, and “perceiving”, a conscious moment of subjective experience that presents a form of potentially irrational knowledge. The logic of the irrational is based on his assumption of their mutually inclusive relationship in that “rational experiments can result in the discovery of something irrational”. Rikala’s ultimate incentive is to transcend the limitations of human reason and intellect, and in turn conceive and make graspable that what we, on this side, feel is the unthinkable, unimaginable beyond of incommensurable space.
Aside from conceptual and minimalist artists like On Kawara and Sol LeWitt, Rikala names Far Eastern philosophy as an informative source and influence. Exercising methods of “meditative repetition” and patterning, arrangement and decomposition, his work systematically juxtaposes and breaks up processual, relative movements of linear time and circular time. Structures of disintegration and decay, as indicators of the inevitable, progressive passage of time, and, likewise, transitional phenomena of recurring, self-renewing character, as signifiers of the cyclical and interstitial passage of time, are elementary themes in Rikala’s works.