Artists’ Film: Hanna Tuulikki - Aberdeen Art Gallery

This series showcases artists’ films from our collection.

This first chapter focuses on a recent acquisition of Hanna Tuulikki’s short film, Seals’kin, filmed in the North East, at Newburgh seal beach in January 2022. Seals’kin will be displayed with other objects which complement the film and its subject matter. 

Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney, this is a sonic and choreographic meditation on loss, longing, transformation and kinship. At the mouth of the river Ythan, where the freshwater meets the North Sea, hundreds of grey and common seals haul out on the estuary banks. Here, Tuulikki explores with her body what it might mean to become-with-seal, drawing on myths of human-seal hybridity and folkloric musical practices to offer alternative forms of mourning through sensuous identification with more-than-human kin.

Hanna Tuulikki is a British-Finnish artist, composer and performer based in Scotland. Her multi-disciplinary projects investigate the ways in which the body communicates beyond and before words, to tell stories through imitation, vocalisation and gesture. With a largely place-responsive process, she considers how bodily relationships and folk histories are encoded within specific environments, ecologies and places.