The Middle Chapters, 2025, clay letters, soil, plants
Time and Space of Melondarin, 2025, 4K-video, 14 min
Solid Like Structures, 2024, 40 cm x 330 cm, clay and wall (installation detail)
Ghostwriter, 2023, sand and wind, 1,5m x 2m
I used an air stream to blow fine sand into a formation, creating a landscape resembling a desert, a sculpture, and writing. The images carried by the wind and the sand.
Ghostwriter II, 2025, sand and wind, 3m x 5m
Sunshine Collection I 4k-video, 10 min
In the moving image installation Sunshine Collection I and II the gathered reflections of sunlight on the walls create a collection of different times and memories. These mundane, easily overlooked sights now take on a significant role by reflecting back a temporal perspective and posing a challenge to contemplate the quality of observations and the hidden images that exist everywhere, as well as their transient nature.
Sunshine Collection II 4k-video, 12 min
Dramatis Personæ, 2021, 29-channel soundwork
Dramatis Personæ equals all the characters of a play, short story, or other narrative. In Tiina Palmu’s sound piece, the play or story is considered more broadly as different forms—such as a life, gallery space, street, or thought. Its characters, Dramatis Personæ, are words, users of a language, and the countless roles held in the human psyche. In the piece, 29 audio speakers repeat all the Finnish words listed in the Finnish Language Board's Internet dictionary as read by the artist. Each of the speakers represents one letter of the alphabet. As they play simultaneously, the space is flooded with concepts and meanings arising from the crisscrossing of random word sequences, memories, and things learned.
Storyteller, 2017, two channel video installation, 11 min 11 s
In Tiina Dia’s video piece Storyteller (Rasskaztšitsa) the artist recites a story she has memorized, in a language she does not speak. The story of 16 piglets at Christmas was originally told to her by a Moldovian woman and is shared in the piece by the artist as if her own.
Tiina Dia met a woman in Helsinki who told her a story from her life in Moldova. After memorizing it in Russian the artist travelled 1800 km to Moldova, to a village where the woman had lived and the events taken place around 60 years ago. There she repeated the story to the villagers who wanted to listen. During the act of reciting the story the artist’s repetitive learning process was counterweighed by a completely uncontrollable situation.
At the core of Tiina Dia’s piece is the attempt to engage through language, and finally the breakdown of communication when the meanings do not meet. ”I could repeat a very concrete sentence, like there were 16 piglets born, and the Russian speaking listener gets that information. The same spot in the story for me is a rise on top of a black and yellow hill, after which there comes a plane,” the artist explains. The piece also carries the traditional continuum of storytelling, inherited through generations, moulding each individual. The name of the exhibition, Rasskaztšitsa, is Russian and translates to a storyteller, which is the perceived role of the artist in the piece.
Creator Chiasm, 2021, digital print, 40cm x 50cm
Attempting Ideal, 2015, HD video, 4 min (loop with sound)
Attempting Ideal is a contemplation of aspiration and achievement. Which is more important?
In the moving image work a character tries to throw the ball from a small hole and only a perfect shot allows success.