#foley objects

In 1956 René Magritte declared“a thing which is present can be invisible, hidden by what it shows.” It is an aphorism that perfectly sums up the work of Jonna Kina.

The series Foley Objects presents about thirty objects –everyday things for the most part – in an equal number of photos, each accompanied by a short caption. At first blush, the latter seems to bear no relation to the image associated with it, conjuring up an atmosphere of surrealist weirdness.

Then, little by little, it dawns on the viewer that the phrase relates to the sound made by the object depicted. Once this principle is grasped, perusing this gallery of images becomes not only disconcerting but fun too. And it is not long before one catches oneself hearing photos.

In audiovisual parlance, the term “Foley” designates sound effect added to a movie at post-production. The noise of footsteps, of a door slamming, of a piece of paper being screwed up – the types of sound not easily recorded during the shoot. The Finnish artist organizes photographs of the objects used by technicians to reproduce these sounds into a typology. Yet this arrangement quickly appears as more than a mere nomenclature, since, above and beyond its purely documentary approach, the series offers a veritable experience of synaesthesia that requires us to reflect on our perceptions and on the limits of the text-image relationship. – Lydia Dorner, Curator, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne