Essi Maaria Orpana is a visual artist currently based in Helsinki, Finland. Orpana works mainly with photography and video and she has recently started adopting more installation-driven approach to her artistic work. Her works often deal with bodily existence and our corporeal connection to time and space and through them, identity. In her latest body of work Orpana examines physical and psychic relations of house, space and corporeality and grounds her work to i.a Gaston Bachelard's book Poetics of Space.

 

Born in 1988, Orpana holds a MA from Aalto University School of Arts focusing on artistic photography and BA from visual arts from Turku University of Applied Science Art Academy. Orpana has also studied fine arts at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain. 

 

In 2022 Essi has been selected as one of the Discovery Award finalists by Encontros da Imagem and will have her work on display at the International Photography and Visual Arts Festival in Braga, Portugal . In 2021 Essi was one of the Futures Nordic Talent winners and exhibited her body of work 'Such is the Silence' as a part of the Copenhagen Photo Festival. The same year Orpana was selected from more than 2500 applications to exhibit as part of a curated group exhibition of 65 artists in "Nordisk Salong" in Helsingborg, Sweden.

 

Lately her works have also been exhibited in a solo show 'Such is the Silence' in Turku Kunsthalle, Turku, Finland (2020) and in curated group exhibition 'On Disappearance' in the Latvian Museum of Photography, Riga, Latvia (2019). Orpana has works in The State Art Collection of Finland and in private collections in Finland and in Denmark.