MOMENTUM

Momentum is proud to exhibit at the 10th anniversary of Photo Basel June 17th-22nd 2025. Featuring the work of Aapo Huhta, Sami Parkinnen & Vincent Fournier, 

Momentum is pleased to present the works of Finnish photographer Aapo Huhta from two distinct series.

Omatandangole (2016–2018) is an introspective visual journey through the Namibian desert, a place Huhta sought as far from the familiar as possible. The series, published as a photobook by Kehrer Verlag in 2019, captures fleeting moments that hover between reality and mirage—images that feel true for a second, yet entirely detached from everyday experience. It is a stark meditation on solitude, the rawness of nature, and the photographer's own internal landscape.

Alongside this earlier work, Momentum will show new pieces from Unstable (2024). In these works, Huhta revisits earlier desert photographs, layering them with traces of memory and material imperfection. Wild horses reappear as ghosts—blurred, spectral, and timeless. The photograph itself becomes an unstable surface: shifting, dissolving, and constantly reforming.’

Sami Parkkinen

In his photographs, Sami Parkkinen wants to reflect on whether it’s possible for us to break away from the concepts and images provided by traditional knowledge-theoretical metaphysics to examine the world and ourselves. How can we create new concepts and images that would help us to understand the inalienability, beauty and diversity of the relationship between humankind and the environment? Because you don’t need to look for the beauty of the world beyond its existence. Beauty is present and it exists here. In his works, Sami Parkkinen also wants to examine and explore spirituality, and spirituality in relation to us and our environment. Can a person be spiritual without the imagery and conceptual framework of traditional religions? In Sami Parkkinen’s imagery, spirituality emerges as various forms of a presence and wonder at the phenomena of the world around us. Spirituality is seen, as it were, as part of the curious nature of humankind without the assumption of greater forces behind the phenomena.

Vincent Fournier

For over two decades, Vincent Fournier has explored futuristic imaginaries through works held in major collections such the MET, Centre Pompidou, and JP Morgan. Momentum presents two interwoven series—Flora Incognita and Space Project, blending science and fiction, past and future, Earth and space. The centerpiece, Flora Incognita, is a speculative herbarium of alien flora created with 3D modeling and animation, inspired by collaborations with scientists from CNRS, NASA, and MNHN. It questions the adaptability of life amid ecological upheaval. Fournier’s work reimagines botanical heritage on other worlds, offering a poetic reflection on our place in the cosmos.

Inspired by the uniqueness of recently discovered exoplanets, this herbarium extrapolates new

forms of plant life capable of adapting to extreme phenomena: supersonic winds, gravitational

collapse, vapor oceans, gaseous tidal waves, metallic rain, hot ice, and endless days and nights. This dialogue between the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial resonates particularly today with the metamorphoses of the living world and its increasingly sophisticated representations. The use of photogrammetry—a technique that models plants by assembling hundreds of photographs— allows for the extrapolation of growth architectures while preserving the plants’ precise forms, colors, and textures with exceptional detail.

Momentum is pleased to announce that it will exhibit a solo show of the work of Aapo Huhta and his latest series Gravity. 

In his new austerely black and white work, Aapo Huhta fills his photographs with a darkness so impenetrable that it dissolves the horizon. This nocturnal void is inhabited by human figures that seem to be shrouded in milky mist or exist behind a veil of cosmic radiation. They are simultaneously both painfully corporeal and infinitely distant, almost like visual echoes from another dimension. These bodies give us no information on the space they inhabit, because their existence does not adhere to the familiar laws of physics.

Three-dimensionality is at peril when Huhta partly dismantles the figurative tradition of the photograph. Through the use of analog processes and methods, he creates works that warp space and time in a way that borders on the grotesque. There is a sense of great urgency in the way in which the artist distorts the contours of the human body: these beings are above all to be described as mortals.

The series Gravity sees Huhta progress along the path of existential discovery. His artistic work has always been concerned with man's relation to surrounding space, and has over the years gradually moved away from its documentary origins towards an increasing level of abstraction. The human figure is a constant subject in Huhta's photography, usually in a highly anonymized form. When reduced to merely a shadowy silhouette, as was the case in the artist's previous series Omatandangole, the individual body becomes a symbol for humanity and can take on a multitude of meanings. Gravity sees Huhta abruptly invert the colour scheme, moving away from the blistering sunshine of his earlier work. As day turns to night, the presence of death makes itself known.

Gravity seems to take place just outside of the imaginary event horizon of a fantastic black hole, in a limbo where both matter and concepts are altered to the point of collapse. The disintegration of the body is exposed in all its terrifying beauty as Huhta rejects the norms of depicting the human individual. But embedded within the endless night of Gravity's outer space are clues of what lies beyond the final loss of power: the end is an enduring arid landscape. This, then, is what peace looks like.

Fournier is a world-renowned fine art photographer based in Paris, France. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum New York, LVMH Foundation Paris, Centre Pompidou Paris, and the Mori Art Museum Tokyo.   

Produced over a period of a decade from 2007-2017, Fournier documents the past and future of space exploration, from the memories of the Apollo program that followed the first steps of man on the moon, to the future NASA SLS rocket destined for Mars. The photos are a deliberate mix of historical and documentarian vision of space adventure with scenes staged by cinema, and Fournier’s childhood memories as well as a journey into our future.

Momentum at Pulse art fair (#booth 502) Miami beach Dec 5th-8th 2019. Featuring the work of Vincent Fournier and Ole Marius Joergensen.