Maija Timonen is a Finnish artist and writer based in London. The formal scope of her films ranges from montages of casually recorded video footage to carefully orchestrated cinematic scenes. Sometimes using literary sources as starting points for her works, she approaches both text and images in a dissective manner. A breakdown of form and its partial reconstruction is used to enquire into the legacies of Modernism, with the political potential of their retrieval as a guiding concern. More particularly, she explores the extent to which a politically oriented art practice can make positive use of practice’s inevitable implication within the structures that it would critically address. In this her work undertakes a reflexive investigation into the limits of practice.

Timonen has just completed a PhD at the Slade School of Art, London. Her work has been shown internationally at festivals and screenings. Her time at BAC was spent working on a film piece The Debtors, loosely based on Bertholt Brecht’s book Flüchtlingsgespräche (Conversations in Exile).

Maija Timonen has been invited to BAC as part of the Artist-in-Residence program for Nordic artists funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers.