Sofia Okkonen’s exhibition Thoughts, Feelings, Behaviour, consisting of staged photographs, presents an anonymous, fully painted nude female figure. Isolated within a photographic studio, the woman is positioned against simple, saturated fields of colour as well as technical surfaces and equipment. The body appears heavy, often reclined and passive. When active, the figure’s actions are directed towards herself, performed for her own sake, or focused on posing.

In the exhibition at Photographic Gallery Hippolyte, decorative buttercream cakes, frames, a quad bike, knives, snakes, a drone and a massage chair also play their own roles. Through these elements, Okkonen explores the interrelations between desire, superficiality, aggression and melancholy.

The works in the exhibition are based on an interest in capturing a figure trapped within itself, yet blind to its own shadows, and the dim atmosphere it produces. The exhibition is underpinned by reflections on the alternation between superficial self-sufficiency and self-loathing vulnerability. The friction and close oscillation between these two opposing forces appear as a way of being in the world, as physical sensations and as a condition: lovelessness arising from a hunger for love.