Toivo Heinimäki - Tetris Bootleg

Tetris Bootleg is a one-week exhibition featuring screen-printed remakes of Toivo Heinimäki’s Tetris photography project. Tetris is a photographic work documenting Helsinki architecture from the 1980s and 1990s. This type of building stock doesn’t always meet contemporary aesthetic or functional ideals, which is why its cultural-historical value is often underestimated. Tetris has previously been exhibited in Poland at Fotofestiwal Łódź and in Latvia at the ISSP Gallery.

By “copying” his own works and combining various printing techniques, Heinimäki pushes his practice beyond the confines of traditional documentary expression. In Tetris Bootleg, images originally shot on 35mm film now literally undergo additional exposure. For Heinimäki, the image surface is as much a material to work with as, say, film, paper, or darkroom chemicals.

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Toivo Heinimäki (b. 1995) is a Helsinki-based visual artist and independent publisher. His practice, rooted in photography, has since expanded to embrace printmaking and graphic design.

In 2020, Heinimäki founded Utu Press, a small publishing house specializing in Finnish photographic art.