Worldmaking with the Aesthetic Apparatus:

Tracing Vision back to the Embodied Observer

Tuula Närhinen

2025   Programme, schedule and events

SELF-PORTRAIT IN SNOW – The Family Tree

Tuula Närhinen’s work-in-progress Self-Portrait in Snow (2025) sets out to explore facial pareidolia, the tendency to see ‘hidden faces’ in the natural world. Snow is harnessed to work as a spiritual medium that provides access to a speculative pictorial heritage. Drawing on  methods of visual empiricism, Dr Närhinen’s playful project explores anthropometric survey techniques. The work introduces a collection of facial imprints, generated by pressing the visage tightly against snow cover.

Counterintuitively, instead of auto-portraits, these head dives into snow generated depictions of strangers surfacing from the bosom of the earth. In browsing this ghostly archive, Närhinen was surprised to find the spitting image of her bearded late father and, subsequently, she spotted more vivid likenesses to other family members as well. 

Starting with the images of her ancestors to portrayals of her unborn children, the speculative record of 190 self-portraits yielded the phenotype of her entire clan. Among the blindly generated portrait she was also able to identify some serendipitous imprints, such as the portrait of one famous Finn, Urho Kekkonen, the longest serving President of the Republic. This ephemeral tribe emerging from the snow allows us to envision a pictorial DNA reaching from totemic past towards future generations.

The exhibition included a participatory workshop Face to Face, where the audience was invited to press a sheet of thin alumunium foil against the visage to produce a mask. The masks were mounted on the wall, and a video documentation showed a composite portrait of them.  The workshop was conducted in collaboration with the artist-curator, Dr. Nina Liebenberg.

The project was presented in the context of the international TRACTS network conference of Visual Anthropology hosted by the University of the Arts Helsinki in September 2025. Self-Portrait in Snow is part of Närhinen’s ongoing research project entitled Worldmaking with the Aesthetic Apparatus 2024-2027, funded by the Resaerch Council of Finland.

In the Self-Portrait in Snow, the snow is harnessed to work as a spiritual medium that provides access to a speculative pictorial heritage. 

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