FRANS PALDANIUS

TRANSIT
2024


“Perhaps the past is open even if it cannot be changed,” writes Susanna Hast in her novel Ruumis/huoneet. It’s something my thoughts have circled around a lot while working on my ongoing project Transit.

Transit reflects my experience of reliving adolescence. It’s coloured by transmasculinity, tentative homoeroticism and lights of the paper mills. Present is the cyclical structure of queer time – the sense of being either hopelessly late or returning to a point long left behind.

Kemiflage
Oil on canvas
50 x 40 cm
2024


Baby Boy
Oil on canvas
50 x 40 cm
2024

The project borrows its name from the sky blue Ford Transit my neighbour used to drive back and forth down his driveway for hours every evening when I was a child and lived in Kemi, the northernmost coastal town in Finland.

First glimpse of Transit was on display at Locker Room, the exhibition I held together with Jenni Vesanen. It took place in B-gallery, Turku 3.10.–20.10.2024.


Boyscape
Oil on canvas
10 x 10 cm
2024 

The term "locker room" refers to a closed space used for changing clothes. Almost without exception, locker rooms are divided according to a binary understanding of gender and have been turned into stages for the performance of normative gender roles.

There is no room for anything outside of this without the threat of violence. However, queerness does not disappear – it simply hides from the eyes of those who don’t know what to look for. This is the perspective our works took in relation to the space we created.

Exhibition documentation:
Frans Paldanius