YOKALENTERI.
Night Calendar.
Collaboration with Cia Rinne.

Yokalenteri is the Finnish word for night calendar. The project translates the duration of night into a continuous visual register, exposing darkness as a temporal and spatial condition at the latitude of Helsinki.

The work takes the form of a large inkjet print structured through a precise correspondence between time and space: each day is represented by one centimetre in width, while each minute corresponds to one millimetre in length. Night appears in black against the white field of daytime, producing a gradual modulation across the year.

Within this temporal structure, the poet Cia Rinne inscribed a series of monthly dream texts in German, embedding language within the rhythm of night. The calendar thus becomes a layered register where darkness, time, and writing coexist without hierarchy.

Yokalenteri continues the investigation initiated with Valokalenteri (light calendar), first developed during an artist residency in Nykarleby, Finland, in 2003. Both works display Finland’s national languages, Finnish and Swedish, and reflect on how variations in light and darkness shape personal and social rhythms.

The project was produced for the exhibition Terra Infirma at ISCP, Brooklyn, in 2010, supported by the Finnish Cultural Institute, and is now part of its permanent collection.

Expose — night, duration, and language are translated into a graphic register, allowing darkness to become directly perceptible as a temporal condition.