tomas aphalo
tomas.apahalo(a)elisanet.fi@tomasaphalo
Fi +358 40 6759 354
Lives and works in Helsinki
Installation from Foto Tallinn Fair 2024
Tomas Raul Aphalo (FI/AR, b. 1996) is a Finnish-Argentinian visual artist who works in the realm of autobiographical experimental documentary photography. Across his work, he employs archival material and fragmentary text alongside his own images. Aphalo often engages in long-term photography projects, creating photo books and exhibitions that are bound by themes of longing, desire and belonging, stemming from his own life experiences.
En La Orilla Opuesta – on the opposite shore – is an exploration of Aphalo’s dual cultural heritage, blending Finnish and Argentinian influences. Through personal photographs, family archives and text fragments, he delves into the nostalgia and longing associated with his childhood trips to Argentina, juxtaposed with the realities of cultural identity. The project reconstructs the enchantment he felt as a child in Argentina, while also acknowledging the distance
between fantasy and reality.
Inspired by magical realism, En La Orilla Opuesta intertwines the ordinary with the fantastical, reflecting the complexities of cultural identity and the blurred boundaries between memory and imagination. Viewers are invited to navigate the emotional terrain of longing and displacement, evoking both nostalgia and disorientation.
By indexing the time and place of each image, the project seeks to convey the universal experience of grappling with the past while navigating the present.
(Description from Foto Tallinn website)