Info

Portrait of Sami Sakari in 2025

About

Sami Sakari Mikkonen (b. 1989) is a multidisciplinary media artist based in Tampere, Finland, working with moving image, installation, photography, digital collage, and sound. His practice engages with questions of mediation, impermanence, and the ways contemporary image technologies shape perception and experience. 

Combining traditional and contemporary tools, from analog cameras to AI-assisted image processes, he works across physical and digital media without privileging a single method. His approach reflects an ongoing tension between control and instability, with recent projects increasingly focused on spectatorship, duration, and the conditions under which images operate within technologically mediated environments.

Statement

My work examines how contemporary experience is shaped by mediated images, technological systems, and regimes of attention. Working primarily with moving image and installation, I create situations that slow perception and limit choice, shifting the viewer from active consumption toward prolonged exposure. Rather than using images to represent reality, I approach them as forces that organize behavior, perception, and affect.

Technology in my practice is treated as a condition rather than a neutral tool. I draw on the visual and sonic languages of mass media, including screens, compression artifacts, and electronic sound, to explore the tension between immersion and disconnection. These elements are used not to evoke nostalgia or spectacle, but to expose how mediated experience increasingly replaces direct engagement.

Earlier photographic work focused on material decay and impermanence. This interest has since shifted toward examining how perception itself is structured and depleted within contemporary image systems, leaving the position of the viewer unresolved.

Contact

contact@samisakari․com

Exhibitions

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

Grants & Awards

2025

Press & Publications