Liminal Spaces by Anni Jokitalo

Mai-Art Gallery

Jan 03 2022 - Jan 31 2022

I spent a lot of time by myself as a teenager. I especially liked wandering around my home town and discovering new places. I could wander through forests, ditches and animal-trodden paths and find abandoned places that no one had been to for a long time. Later, I especially sought out abandoned buildings, as they were a bit scary, but beautiful in their own way.

The places I found had a certain atmosphere; a stillness, a detachment. When I arrived at these places, it was as if society, social pressures and other people had been left behind on a different plane of reality. A few years ago I came across a term that described this experience perfectly: liminal space.
I was elated that an experience that had no name or definition before now actually existed outside of my own head.

A liminal space is a place or area that is temporally, structurally, or intentionally in an intermediate state. Such places include empty school hallways in the summer, abandoned buildings, airports at dawn, even your grandmother's flowered toilet can be a liminal space. Such places are not meant for entertainment, they exist only for transit, as an in-between space. Therefore, stopping by them can bring special feelings to the surface. The liminal experience is also strongly influenced by the absence of other people. The viewer gets the strong feeling that he or she is not really supposed to be here. This is not the final, finished, appropriate, or right time to be here.

When the sense of detachment is strong enough, the viewer may experience feelings of fear, peace, melancholy, or even nostalgia. These feelings can cause discomfort that drives many away from the space, but I am one of those people who find such spaces soothing.
When life and time slip through your fingers, it feels safe to know that there are also places where none of this seems to matter. Those lonely places that remain unchanged year after year.

In my Liminal Spaces exhibition I photographed various liminal spaces in South Karelia. Based on these images, I created a series of acrylic paintings, in which I tried to convey the experience of liminality.

- Anni Jokitalo