Photons of Mars

Photons of Mars is a three-channel installation with sculptural elements that invites a quiet kind of closeness: to people at work, to the places that shape that work, and to a landscape we know only through images.

Adapted from The Other Side of Mars yet conceived as an independent piece, the installation is presented as a 17-minute loop without dialogue or voice-over. It is built around attention rather than narration -staying with gestures, routines, and the pace of looking inside environments dedicated to interplanetary research. In filmed sequences at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and related sites, we follow the daily work behind Martian imagery: a roboticist and Mars rover driver, and the labour of those who build the cameras that make the planet visible to us.

Across time, the images gathered from Mars become more than information -more than photons translated into pixels. They accumulate into a lived relationship: an intimacy formed through repeated looking, careful interpretation, and sustained attention. As the work itself suggests, “seeing takes work”, and that work is shared between instruments and humans, between distant terrain and the people that learn to read it.

Opposite the projections, a glass vitrine holds a model of the Martian rock “Jake Matijevic,” grounding the installation’s optics in a small, tangible object. The arrangement resists a single narrative pull, allowing viewers to remain with the material as it moves between Earth and Mars, and to sense how distance can become familiar through attention.

Exhibitions and Collections

The three-channel film installation Photons of Mars is part of the exhibition SPACE: Internal Illuminations, curated by Iris Long and Johan Vikner. The exhibition opened at Fotografiska Shanghai  on November 12 and runs until March 8 2026.

The installaion was shown as part of the Waag Society‘s More-Than-Planet exhibition curated by Miha Turšič. Taking place in the world’s oldest university observatory in Leiden the exhibition opened on July 1st , and closes December 23rd 2022.

Photons of Mars was featured in the group exhibition A I S T I T / coming to our senses curated by Satu Herrala and Hans Rosenström at Helsinki Kunsthalle, fall 2021. In November 2021 it was exhibited at CYFEST-13 at the Stieglitz State Academy in St Petersburg, as part of the program MARS: Facts and Fiction curated by Nina Czegledy and Lydia Griaznova.

In 2019, the installation was shown as part of the group exhibition Supre:Organism at Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen in the Netherlands, by the Waag Society. The curator of the exhibition was Miha Turšič.

The installation was included in the collection of Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, spring 2019.

Credits

Script, editing and video composition: Minna Långström
Producer: Liisa Karpo
Camera: päivi Kettunen
Second unit camera: Minna Långström
Music: Mira Calix
Sound design: Pelle Venetjoki
3D-animation: Nuutti Koskinen and David Berg