Pelekääkkö nää polliisia?
Farbod Fakharzadeh, Katie Lenanton, Phan Nguyen, Yujie Zhou, and Vinayak
9.5.–30.8.2026, Photo North – Northern Photographic Centre gallery
9.5.–14.6.2026, Ränni Galleria
Welcome to the opening from 17-19 on Friday 8.5 at Photo North – Northern Photographic Centre gallery
Pelekääkkö nää polliisia?— Are you scared of the police? This question is often posed rhetorically, as a humorous way to showcase the local dialect of Oulu. Yet policing—and resistance or compliance towards it—has long been enshrined in this city’s public and cultural spaces, and in the collective memories of its inhabitants.
The main exhibition—at Photo North – Northern Photographic Centre gallery—is housed in a former site of incarceration, a police lockup for 100 years that closed in 1988.
But Pelekääkkö nää polliisia? is also presented at Ränni-galleria in Oulu train station until 14.6. Working with an archival image by photographer Matti Pietola, who documented the 1990 youth riot for Kaleva newspaper, the curators devised an installation that plays with the space’s mirrored interior.
Using the framing device of a fair ground display, the viewer is invited to peer through the cut-outs, replacing the faces of the young person or the police officer with their own. They are greeted by a fragmented self-portrait, and can choose which “uniform” to try on. This act of looking through a shattered visage could suggest the impossibility of coherence when it comes to how we can understand histories, pointing at the impossibility of a singular narrative.
The fragmented faces also speak to a very ‘90s aesthetic sensibility that echoes and recurs throughout the artworks in the exhibition at Photo North. At that time, post-structuralist artists and thinkers shattered the authority of singular narratives by using techniques like appropriation, cut ups, and sampling to deconstruct, reflect, and layer their competing understandings of the present. Welcome to Photo North to see these ideas further developed through an exhibition of expanded photography.
