Kehrer Verlag Hertta Kiiski & Niina Vatanen: Archive Play

Archive Play is a photographic art book based on the exhibition Glimpses of the Unattainable, which was displayed at the Finnish Museum of Photography in 2014. Together with curator Mirjami Schuppert, Finnish artists Hertta Kiiski and Niina Vatanen explored the large archive of 5,000 negatives left behind by amateur photographer Helvi Ahonen, and sought to find new, intuitive ways of looking at old photographs and connecting them to the future.

Archive Play brings together the two independent works from the exhibition: Present (Thank You Helvi Ahonen) by Hertta Kiiski and Archival Studies / A Portrait of an Invisible Woman by Niina Vatanen. A further interpretative layer is created by a fictional short story written by well-known Finnish author Monika Fagerholm. The book was published by the German art publishing house Kehrer Verlag.