About Harri Kallio
Harri Kallio (b. 1970) was born in Finland and has lived and worked in New York City since 2001. His work exists in a space where irrevocable change becomes image, image becomes ritual, and ritual becomes a technology of remembering. Across photography-based biological imaging with earth, pigment-print collage, and sculpture, Kallio constructs speculative ecologies and time-encoded surfaces that ask what it means to be a species in the act of vanishing. His past project — The Dodo and Mauritius Island: Imaginary Encounters — and his ongoing work — World of Disappearing, D(L)iminal Man, Non-Geometric Observer, Biomorphic Alphabet, Shape of Infinity, A Grammar of Unknowing, and Infinity Clock — belong to the Entropic Imaginarium, Kallio’s studio practice: a constellation of inquiry into memory, myth, and the collapsing boundary between the made and the grown.
Kallio’s most prominent project so far, The Dodo and Mauritius Island, Imaginary Encounters (2001–2004), used the extinct Dodo as a case study. This large-scale installation combined sculpture and large-format photography and was widely exhibited. His work has been featured at the Aperture Gallery, George Eastman House exhibition “Why Look at Animals” (2006), the International Center of Photography’s “Ecotopia: The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video”, FotoFest 2006, Houston, Texas, Columbus Museum of Art (2007) and Bonni Benrubi Gallery, NYC (2006). His first monograph, The Dodo and Mauritius Island, Imaginary Encounters, was published in 2004 and won the European Publishers Award for Photography. His work was also included in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation exhibition “Photography and Engineering 1846–2006” in Lisbon, Portugal, and at Bozar, Brussels, Belgium. His work was also shown in the exhibition “Rare Bird: John James Audubon and Contemporary Art” at the Berman Museum in Collegeville, PA (2016), and in “Endangered Species: Artists on the Front Line of Biodiversity” at the Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, WA (2018).
His work has appeared in numerous international publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Financial Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Aperture Magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, Citizen K, Le Monde2, El Pais Semanal (Spain), Universum Magazin (Austria), DPI Magazine (Taiwan), Falter Magazine (UK) and “사진” (Photography, South Korea), and in Sarah Bezan’s essay “Dodo Birds and the Anthropogenic Wonderlands of Harri Kallio” (Parallax, 2019). He has received several awards and grants, including the Foto Finlandia Prize (2006) and grants from the Finnish Arts Council and Cultural Foundation. In 2007, he was an artist-in-residence at the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation.
“Kallio’s images are grown rather than made — photographic negatives handed over to soil, microbes, and time, and retrieved altered. Across twenty-plus years the work has put a single question to the living world and recorded what comes back: what remains when a presence is gone, what preservation actually preserves, where the boundary between the made and the grown gives way. It refuses the clean futurism it stands against, but it is not only refusal — it is an argument, in material form, that the biosphere and the upright apes wandering about with their machines deserve a better story than the one currently unfolding.”
