KARUIZAWA (HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOHN) (2025)

The short film Karuizawa (Happy Birthday John) by Paula Saraste and Aarni Vaarnamo was filmed in Japan in the autumn of 2024. The piece is site-specific, created in locations where John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent time during the 1970s. The soundtrack features a partially AI-generated phone conversation between Paula Saraste and John Lennon. In the dialogue, they discuss a secret love affair and arrange a meeting in Karuizawa, which is depicted in documentary footage. The work includes visits to places such as the legendary Hotel Mampei. Relying on landscape-driven storytelling, the piece intertwines themes of longing for love and constructed memory.

One-channel-installation for exhibition space or screening

Sound design by Jarkko Kela
Produced by Film co-op Paraika
The film is made possible by generous support from The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture Finland AVEK
Color, stereo / 5.1, 4K, 1.66:1
19 minutes

The film has been recently shown at Slow Art Center Nagoya, Japan and at Galleria Aski, Turku, Finland
It will be on view 12.1.—8.2.2026 at Galleria Huuto, Helsinki as well as 25.7.—18.8.2026 at Mältinranta Artcenter, Tampere, Finland

 LET US STAY FOR A WHILE (2022)

Something the title already alludes to the film Let us Stay for a While (2022) takes its conceptual inspiration from Jean-Luc Nancy’s proposal within the framework of different catastrophes: that we could remain exposed to and think about what is happening to us. It is we who are arriving and leaving and we who encounter catastrophic events or eras like the anthropocenic. In the film Let us Stay for a While the aeroplane as a symbol of human technical development - the human-machine - is destroyed, and a new kind of time initiates. 

Let us Stay for a While is a story about a weekend on a remote island, an adventure. The protagonists witness a mystical aeroplane accident and rescue one of the survivors to the island. Inexplicable things start to happen, the protagonists are thrown back to an altered mood and the island doesn’t seem to want them to leave. 

The film raises the question of what remains of us and what do we want to leave behind. What are the ways of staying and what of leaving? It also questions where we are going to, and it is ultimately a wish that we could stay for a bit longer. The idea of nature as something veiled and revealing itself to the human only slowly is thematized in the film - a mystical stone has been found on the island - and the protagonists’ understanding or knowledge of each other or what they perceive can not be perfect but only partial.

The work is a narrative digital film that stands at the confluence of the genre of psychological thriller and less traditional narrative dramaturgy. Aesthetically the film interweaves elements from the past with possible timeless and futuristic indications. The costume bears traces of the 1920’s Russian avant garde, scouts as well as military uniforms. A phenomenon widely present in literature (i.e. Francis Bacon, Johann Gottfried Schnabel), the island as a location has a special relation to time. In Let us Stay for a While it exists as a time-space, a temporalization between expectations of the end of the present age and narrative flashbacks on the level of dialogue.

A gallery version of the film will be on view at the Myymälä2 gallery in Helsinki on 30.6.-24.7.2022. Let us Stay for a While occupies the intersection of film and performance as Sara Kovamäki’s performative gestures intersperse between narrative passages and create a new kind of dialogue between the two media. The performance brings the narration towards the realms of dream and the unconscious. Having a different relation to time, both film and performance share an interest in the human experience. Time and montage as being essential questions for film encounter a different kind of time in the exhibition space - time that is not edited: presence.

one-channel-installation for exhibition space or screening

color, stereo, 4K, 2.35:1

30 minutes

Cast: Anka Graczyk, Alexander Zirkler, Andreas Markus and Bernhard Schill

Performances by Sara Kovamäki

Director of Photography Michael Clemens
Screenplay Paula Saraste and Daniel Redel
Art Director A.R.T. / Jules Hepp
Sound Recording Janne Vahtola
Sound Design Timo Puukko
Music Jonas Meyer
Camera Assistant Aarni Vaarnamo
Montage Paula Saraste
Color Grading Michael Clemens
1st Assistant Director Timo Puukko
2st Assistant Director Daniel Redel
Lightning Aarni Vaarnamo, Michael Clemens
Special Effects Juha Mattila
Assistant on set Marja Saraste
Conceived by Paula Saraste

The film is made possible by generous support from
The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture Finland AVEK
Arts Promotion Centre Finland
Ballhaus Rixdorf Studios Berlin

 WEITER ZUM WASSER (2021)

Weiter zum Wasser / Down to the Water (2021) tells the story of a small family escaping their home at night. They embark a journey towards an unknown destination and go missing. The father drives his family to an increasingly despaired state and finally he ends up in confusion and loneliness. It is a story of an end of a family. The daughter and mother gradually liberate themselves from the oppressive father, who is failing and not being able to overcome his fear.

The film reflects the unknown as both something not chosen or happened in the past as well as a possible state of things being and becoming. The unknown yet having an impact on the ones to whom it is not known. The film approaches the inexplicable without retracing, as a fragment of multiple possible narratives.

The gallery version of the work was shown in the exhibition Fragments from the Unknown in Gallery Forum Box, Helsinki in January 2021.

one-channel-installation for exhibition space or screening

color, stereo, 4K, 2:1

18’12 minutes

Cast: Christian Harting, Constanze Priester, Luzie Ahrens

Cinematography & Color grading Michael Clemens
1st assistant director Daniel Redel
Production coordinator and 2nd assistant director Dren Zherka
Assistant camera Aline Reinsbach
Sound recording Bernd Latzel
Screenplay Paula Saraste, Daniel Redel
Production Juhani Koivumäki, Daniel Redel, Paula Saraste
Lighting Michael Clemens, Aline Reinsbach, Matthias Ihrke
Make-up artist Karina Evdokimova
Set design Thanh Nguyen
Sound design Timo Puukko
Music Jonas Meyer, Timo Puukko
Montage Paula Saraste, Timo Puukko
Production drivers Matthias Ihrke, Frank Böhmke
Radio voices Anton Hempel, Nathalie Tafelmacher-Magnat
Conceived by Paula Saraste

The film is made possible by generous support from
Avek / Mediarata - media art development support
Arts Promotion Centre Finland
VISEK Centre for the Promotion of Visual Art
Ballhaus Rixdorf Studios

These Places Between (2018)

single channel video
color, stereo, HD 16:9
5’44 minutes

During my journey, I stopped by in places where I felt something special, an ambivalent mood, at the same time a certain calm, a concentrated and shared afternoon in public places. It is possible that my mind was wandering in the paths of cinematic fantasy and I was unconsciously trying to catch the atmosphere of the films that I had seen. In the end I gave up this search for the perfect place, time and coincidence. The pictures are rather observations of a lone traveller and outsider into the perfect exotic without any real encounter with it, with no possibility to escape the self.

The work was featured in the exhibition Haunt in HilbertRaum, Berlin 2018.

Transitions (2016-2017)

Transitions is a series of installation, video and photographic works that approach mixed feelings triggered by flying and traveling from different perspectives. The works are based especially on notes of fear of flying, its manifestations and attempts to free oneself from it. They are also linked to the simultaneous presence and possibility of death and to the material and unpredictable nature of human life. The works were recently featured in Transitions, Galleria Huuto, Helsinki 2017.

Transitional Objects is a series of seven photographs of items that help nervous passengers when flying. Each photograph is named after the person the photographed item belongs to: Amoona, Taylor, Timo, Rena, Mary, Silke and Weiyin. 30,8 × 30,8cm each, pigment prints, framed, 3 + 1ap

The work On an Earth Condemned to Matter consists of 36 black and white photographs depicting various rural and urban landscapes in Southeast Asia. Placed in a serial, nonhierarchical order, the pictures offer no narrative traces. They have undergone a repetitive and even compulsive alternation. The sky has been violently torn away in order to eliminate the fear of flying and the memory of it. The material wounds of the paper are woven into the image and thus become a part of the landscape. Paradoxically they signify an absence by means of their own presence. The work was also featured in Virus, Galleria Lapinlahti, Helsinki 2016. Pigment print, framed, unique, 80 x 120cm

Test for the Case of Emergency, 2017, ABS- filament, glass fibre, acryl

Place, Later in Time (a stone to fly with for the superstitious), 2017, paper, stone, sound

Repeated Sequence (Landscape), 2017, 3 pigment prints, 42 x 56cm

Where She is at, 2017, single channel video, 16:9, 3’15 min, loop. The work was last featured in Haunt, HilbertRaum, Berlin 2018

Sky in Two Parts, 2017, single channel video, 16:9, 6 ́10 min, loop

18F (window), 2017, pigment print mounted on diasec, 62 x 62cm, 3 + 1 AP

Take Away, 2017, single channel video, 4:3, 1 ́54 min, loop

Be a Good Plane, 2017, pigment print mounted on aluminium, 19 x 28cm, 3 + 1 AP

All things, passing (2015-2023)

All things, passing is a conceptual work about fandom and desire. It consists of approximately 90 photographs, a digital video projection, a piece of text and an object installation. The work is an unending process and a collection where something is always missing. The photographs are reproductions of printed documentary photographs where the main subject, John Lennon, is wholly or partially removed and replaced with imaginary pictorial material.

The work reflects the medium of photography, photographic presentation and its relation to the reality as well as the unobtainable and the death. It combines the constantly reappearing thematics of representation of absence in photography and in the Western art history. By erasing the subsequently dead subject, the work makes an aggressive counteract to photography (an aggressive act in itself) as memento mori. By removing John Lennon from the gaze of others, he is taken into the sole possession of the artist herself. Contrary to i. e. eliminating politically controversial persons from photographs, here the object of admiration has been removed. This can be seen as a repetition of the actual murder which at least partly had its motives in possessing and jealousy. In addition to Lennon, most of the marks of the removal have been taken away from the pictures. This means the artist has not only got rid of something but also withdrawn herself.

In All things, passing, the past is transformed and becomes more fluid. The subject of the original photographs is deceased, and the iconic locations are slowly losing their once “self-evident” significance. In the end, feelings and memories fade, disappear, or are forgotten—obscured by each new coating of everyday life. The work combines fundamental questions regarding the power of photography to immortalise and document—while simultaneously questioning what lies beyond the frame.

The amount of the photographs can change since the idea of the collection is not to be comprehensive. Instead it includes places of human forgetting that give space to a flow of thought. Each photograph is named after the place and time where the original picture was taken.

The work has been exhibited in the Exhibition Laboratory Project Room in Helsinki 2015, in Galerie Pleiku in Berlin 2015 and in the Photographic Gallery Hippolyte Studio in Helsinki 2020. It also includes a publication Vast Distances (2022) and it will be on view on October in Makers’ Gallery in Vaasa, Finland. A further exhibition will take place in Jyväskylä Finland in January-February 2023.

installation for exhibition space,
approx. 115 pigment prints, size varies, framed / unframed
a video projection
a text installation
object installations

1 W 72nd St, NYC (2015)

The video 1 W 72nd St, NYC is a looping video shot on the spot where John Lennon was murdered. It shows a man passing by, always entering and leaving the picture. The place is like any other even though it is one of the most famous murder places of the near history. By slowing down the time the video makes the space appear even more special and meaningful. The video is part of the work All things, passing.

All things, passing: 1 W 72nd St, NYC
video projection for exhibition space
1:21 min, 16:9 PAL, loop

The sleeping man (2014)

The sleeping man is a narrative short film, a parable in pictures that takes place in a world where dream and reality intersect. It tells the story of melancholy that is actively striven after yet out of control. The protagonist finds an almost dead, shipwrecked man that delivers him a huge perfect pearl in the end. But now, possessing something precious: it all has no meaning anymore.

The work was featured in Save Our Souls, 9th Ewha international Media Art Presentation in Seoul, South Korea.

one-channel-installation for exhibition space
color, stereo, HD 16:9
11’03 minutes

Cast: Christian Harting, Rodrigo Garcia Alves, Drifa Hansen, Simson Bubbel
Assistant director: Dren Zherka
Director of Photography: Daniel Redel
Sound Operators: Thorsten Broda, Kai Müller, Alex Töchterle
Sound design & mixing: Kai Müller
Camera assistance: Georg Simbeni, Nicolas Planq, Aline Reinsbach
Lighting: Michael Clemens, Uli Decker, Ursula Henke, David Winnerstam
Make-up and hair design: Verena Schroff
Continuity: Tereza Petrogiannaki, Nathalie Tafelmacher-Magnat
Set photography: Heli Kaskinen
Set runner: Julius Schindler
Post-Production: Paula Saraste, Daniel Redel
Conceived by Paula Saraste

Filmed on location: Ballhaus Rixdorf Studios Berlin
With generous support from the University of the Arts Helsinki and Aalto University of Art and Design

Four short films on Johannes Brahms (2013)

These four short films tell about the German composer Johannes Brahms and his relation to the Romantic poetry. Many important themes of the Romanticism intertwine in Brahms’s music: beauty of nature, fanciful Romantic love, admiration of the romanticized Middle Ages and the world of fairytales. The films impart the scientific information on Brahms with multifaceted means: performances of Brahms’s songs, piano and chamber music, played music examples, illustration, multimedia and video art.

The series of documentary films is directed by Paula Saraste. The script is by the Brahms scholar and pianist Terhi Dostal. Several well-known Finnish musicians perform in these films: the violinist Pauliina Valtasaari and the singers Annami Hylkilä, Ann-Marie Heino, Niall Chorell and Aarne Pelkonen. The production of the films was supported by the Development Centre of the Sibelius-Academy.

one / multible channel for screening or exhibition space
color, stereo, HD 16:9
80 minutes
English and German, subtitles in Finnish, English and German

Zoloft (2013)

Zoloft is a photography series that consists of five large scale colour pigment prints mounted on aluminium. As the title of the work indicates, the photographs take their formal and conceptual inspiration from the medicine Zoloft.

Zoloft is one of the most prescribed antidepressant on the U.S. retail market. It is prescribed i.e. for depression, panic disorder and social anxiety.

The pictures stand at the confluence of abstract and figurative, offering a stage for individual interpretations. The images are divided into layers of light and dark and they allude to the possibility of a space inside and outside. Just like the medicine constructs an additional layer between its user and the world, it also makes one ask, to what extent the image or the mind of the viewer is defined by it.

Zoloft I was featured in the exhibition Varasto in Galleria Lapinlahti, Helsinki 2017.

Zoloft I
80 x 120cm
Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Zoloft II
80 x 120cm
Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Zoloft III
80 x 120cm
Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Zoloft IV
110 x 165cm
Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Zoloft V
80 x 120cm
Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Paris (2012)

Paris is a story about a night and an idea that emerges and disappears. It is a portrayal of a mystical encounter and a journey that lasts only till the morning.

The work was featured in the exhibition Haunt in HilbertRaum, Berlin 2018.

one-channel-installation for exhibition space
color, stereo, HD 16:9
9’35 minutes
German with English subtitles

Cast: Lisa Marie Becker, Anka Graczyk,
Marc Hodapp, Alexander Zirkler

Director of Photography: Daniel Redel
Assistant Director: Natalia Sanhueza
Sound Operator: Rene Paulokat
Post-Production: Paula Saraste, Daniel Redel
Location Manager: Dren Zherka
Grip: Marco Rüdiger
Make-up and costume: Jeanette Karstaedt
Conceived by Paula Saraste

Nachts (2011)

Nachts is a short video work that plays with the magic of film: a sudden disappearance possible only on screen is caused by a telephone call. The work can be seen as a filmic continuity to the Ballhaus-photo series: the protagonist lets the building take her body to the unknown.

one-channel-installation for exhibition space
color, stereo, HD 16:9
1’23 min