Saara Ekström – GEOPSYCHE
How is the Earth’s inner life connected to our bodies and memories? In GEOPSYCHE, Saara Ekström invites the viewer into a meditative film experience where volcanic eruptions, caves, and fossils mirror humanity’s bond with nature’s forces and geological time.
Exhibition period: September 13 – October 26, 2025
Admission: Free
Visit the exhibition: See the museum’s opening hours and practical information before your visit.
In the three-part film GEOPSYCHE, Saara Ekström intertwines the ancient history of the Earth with the human inner world. She films sites where nature’s inconceivable powers are in motion – volcanoes, caves, geological strata – as well as museum collections that preserve traces of life and time.
Ekström reveals how the Earth reshapes itself and gathers memories: through stone, fossils, and petrified remains. Indirectly, this is also reflected in our human bodies, which carry evolutionary traces from earlier mammals and prehistoric life forms – in our calcium-filled skeletons, muscle memory, and salt levels.
With a sensitive eye, the black-and-white film records sculptural details and monumental landscapes. The images rest on specially composed, repetitive music. GEOPSYCHE is a meditation on time. In the intricate and infinitely slow geological metabolism of the Earth, human existence will amount to only a brief period and a thin layer of soil in the planet’s future sediment.
The film is 23 minutes long and shown in a loop.
It was recorded in Spain, Iceland, Finland, and Sweden. GEOPSYCHE is a new acquisition for Uppsala Art Museum’s collections.
About Saara Ekström
Saara Ekström, born in 1965, is based in Turku, Finland. She works with film, photography, and installations, and has exhibited internationally since the 1990s. She has received several awards, including the Finnish State Art Prize in Visual Arts in 2023.