PROFESSIONAL TEENAGERS (2001-2005)
‘Professional Teenagers’ is an ongoing art project of two Finnish interdisciplinary artists Leena Kela and Suvi Parrilla. ‘Professional Teenagers’ examines the different phenomenas in youth culture though various media for documentation. The project concentrates to construction of teenager’s identity, the symbolism in marking one’s body and young people’s ways to locate themselves in the surrounding cultures. Different ways to decorate or even hurt one’s body shows the belonging to a certain subculture and reveal something from teenager’s inner world to the world outside. Young people try to find their own position in the culture and the expression for their own identity from their own bodies and the aesthetics of the bodies through dressing up, piercing, tattooing and also through specific gesture language.
Youth cultures are products of diverse
society. They are manifestations of countercultures, which try to find
new values and ways of living and also bring change to the society they
belong in.
Professional Teenagers –project documents the everyday expressions
in youth cultures; love bites, drawings on one’s skin, piercings
and ways to cut and hurt one self. We are missing initiation rites in
the Western culture. Are these marks made on one’s skin to bound
teenagers in a way what the tribe rituals used to do? The images reveal
something that is hidden from the adult world, but definitely something
which is also part of it. The body and the mind are in change, being a
teenager is being between two stages in life where the exaggerations are
acceptable and also very visible in the outbursts of feelings.
Professional Teenagers –project documents the everyday expressions in youth cultures; love bites, drawings on one’s skin, piercings and ways to cut and hurt one self. We are missing initiation rites in the Western culture. Are these marks made on one’s skin to bound teenagers in a way what the tribe rituals used to do? The images reveal something that is hidden from the adult world, but definitely something which is also part of it. The body and the mind are in change, being a teenager is being between two stages in life where the exaggerations are acceptable and also very visible in the outbursts of feelings. The imagery in the photographs is framed with consideration. The photographs try to avoid set ups and documentation of the models is as authentic as possible. Because of the personal and delicate nature of the photographs, the models are anonymous.
In presenting our work we are using city- and street-spaces. Our project is presented in Window Gallery Studio Hyäryllistä at spring 2002. We have also presented this work example in car park in ANTI- Contemporary Art Festival in Kuopio in autumn 2002 and in Lahti , Selleri – Contemporary Art in The City 2003. In the may 2003 we exhibited the work in the backyard of the old cookie factory in Turku . We were endangering our work for marking, like graffiti writing and succeeded pretty well.
We created a Professional Teenagers soundtrack “Fuck You Asshole” by interviewing Finnish teenagers talking rude words in English. The work was a part of Blind Sight exhibition of sound-art in the Dundee Contemporary Art in Scotland and Gallery Titanik in Turku , Finland .
In 2005 we had exhibition at Gallery Myymälä2 in Helsinki.