EMMA SARPANIEMI: Two Ways to Carry a Cauliflower

JARMUSCHEK + PARTNER is pleased to present the first solo show of Emma Sarpaniemi in its gallery at Potsdamer Straße. The exhibition is part of the European Month of Photography Berlin 2025.

Two Ways to Carry a Cauliflower (2021-ongoing) is a performative photography series exploring women’s self-portraiture through play. To free the subject and the gaze from certain patriarchal ideals of femininity, the subject depicted in the images is portrayed playfully and tenderly as a woman who behaves, looks, and performs on her terms and rules.

Often, playfulness can be perceived as naivety when associated with a female artist. Sarpaniemi, however uses it as a source of power. The portrayed characters offer the possibility to continuously reconstruct oneself. In her universe, identity, reality, and imagination intertwine. Sarpaniemi is not creating an alter ego, but instead, presenting an honest representation, in which she recognize herself.
 

Sarpaniemi stages the scenes, selects the clothes, and designs the self-portraits herself. The starting point for self-portraits is often an object or a clothing found at a flea market, from which the artist begins to construct a photograph. Sometimes traces of friends’ presence and collaboration appear in self-portraits through a painted house, blue lips, wooden frames, or a friend focusing behind the camera.
 

Emma Sarpaniemi (b.1993) is based in Helsinki. In her practice, she explores womanhood and definitions of femininity through performative self-portraits. For her, self-portraiture is a playground, a realm for exploring representation and resisting conventions of the gaze. Collaboration and collectivity hold an important role in her work. Emma Sarpaniemi has received a BA in photography from The Royal Academy of Art (KABK) The Hague in 2019. Her work has been exhibited in galleries, museums, and festivals throughout Europe, including Les Rencontres d’Arles, Athens Photo Festival, The Finnish Museum of Photography, Turku Art Museum, Museum Folkwang, and Miettinen Collection. The artist’s works are included in the collections of The Finnish Museum of Photography, HAM Helsinki Art Museum, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Turku Art Museum, The Finnish State Art Deposit Collection, Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation Collection, Museum Folkwang, Miettinen Collection, Heino Art Foundation, and private collections in Finland, Germany, The Netherlands, and Switzerland.