Siiri Jüris Swedish-Estonian, b. 1992

By combining painting with sculptural and graphic elements, digital tools, and algorithm-based processes, Siiri Jüris develops a hybrid visual language that explores coexistence, interdependence, and emotional connection. Working primarily with archival photographs depicting physical touch or wrestling, the artist removes these images from their original contexts, transforming them into ambiguous records of intimacy. These are interwoven with personal memories, art-historical references, and philosophical texts, and translated into bodily landscapes where abstract and figurative, organic and synthetic, and analog and digital elements coexist without a fixed hierarchy. Jüris layers, injures, and overworks the surface not to master it, but to discover how it responds. Each element becomes an active partner in the image-making process: paint, tools, environment, and other people. Marks made by the artist’s child or by others appear within the works as traces of a concrete lived reality, tied to experiences of being an immigrant, artist, and mother, and they actively guide the painting process. Through this practice, the artist investigates how the collective can exist within individuality, and how the presence of other hands can be sensed in a work without dissolving the singular artistic expression that holds it together. The resulting paintings hold contradictions without resolving them, staging a simultaneity between control and chance, hand and machine, individuality and collectivity.