Johanna
Naukkarinen
She examines the power relations embedded in historical and contemporary images through her photographic and mixed-media art practice. Her critical, colorful, and often ironic works revolve around the concept of women as objects of the scientific gaze. In her work, she plays with vintage scientific aesthetics and contemporary techniques.
The main focus of Naukkarinen’s work has been on female hysteria and gender roles in historical anatomical imagery.
Naukkarinen graduated from the Fine Art Photography programme at the Arts Academy at Turku University of Applied Sciences and completed her MA in Media Studies at the University of Turku.
She held her graduation exhibition at Turku Art Museum Studio in 2016, followed by seven solo exhibitions, including shows at B-Galleria (2019), Galleria Huuto (2020), Yö Galleria (2021), GalleriA (2022), and Photographic Centre Peri (2024). Her works are represented in the collections of Turku Art Museum, Kuopio Art Museum, and the Turku City Art Collection.
Available for commissions and collaborations
Contact:
mari.johanna.naukkarinen(at)gmail.com
+358400768827
News
New Solo Exhibition:
Attractive Specimen, Galleria Mältinranta, Tampere, 22.8-15.9.2026
Kuninkaankatu 2, 33210 Tampere
What would it be like to study human anatomy through pin-up images? And what might a feminine dissection table look like? Johanna Naukkarinen’s exhibition Attractive Specimen explores gender roles in historical medical anatomical imagery, as well as the history of medical sexism. At the heart of the exhibition are digital image collages, photographs, and fictional infographics that explore the position of female-assigned bodies as objects of the scientific gaze. The exhibition takes the form of an imaginary museum, where the histories of science and art collide.
At a time when conservative movements are seeking to restrict women’s and gender minorities’ right to knowledge about their own bodies, Naukkarinen uses historical examples to reveal the sexist traditions embedded in medicine. In anatomical imagery drawn from different periods, women are presented as corporeal spectacles, echoing representations from the history of art. At times more directly, at others more obliquely, Attractive Specimen asks: who gets to appear as the neutral image of humanity in the production of knowledge about the human body?
One of the exhibition’s central themes is the tradition of paintings of anatomical dissection at the intersection of scientific and artistic imagery. For centuries, male bodies were a staple of painted imagery, until the nineteenth century, when dead women also began to appear in anatomical dissection paintings, bringing new aesthetic conventions to the genre. Naukkarinen brings together paintings of anatomical dissection from different centuries and compares the gender roles they depict.
Also on display in the exhibition is the controversial textbook The Anatomical Basis of Medical Practice (1971). It originated at Duke University in North Carolina, where a group of male professors wanted to update the teaching materials for first-year medical students. Their decision to commission Playboy photographers to create pin-up-style images depicting female anatomy for the book caused an uproar. At the same time, it brought to light elements of sexism prevalent in medical schools in the early 1970s. In her work addressing the book, Naukkarinen takes its imagery apart and reworks it in the form of imaginary health posters.
In the preface to the anatomy textbook, its authors state that the book should prepare medical students for the arrival of exceptionally beautiful women (attractive, well-turned specimen) at their future practices. The description of women as ‘attractive specimens’ forms part of a long continuum of medical sexism, and as the title of the exhibition, it now also becomes part of Naukkarinen’s sustained artistic practice exploring gender roles in the history of medicine.
The following individuals and organisations have contributed to the creation of the works in the exhibition. The dissection table for On Their Shoulders (A Feminine Dissection Table) (2026) was made by sculptor Eero Nives. The shape of the tabletop was designed according to the dimensions provided by Museo Palazzo Poggi in Bologna. Thoracic surgeon Nelli Nurminen assisted with The Dissection of The Anatomical Basis of Medical Practice (2026). The archival materials used in the same work were made available to the artist by the archive of Duke University Medical Center. Laura Jalava appears in the series of works The Anatomist.
The exhibition has been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the Finnish Cultural Foundation (Southwest Finland Regional Fund), and an anonymous donor.
The Infamous Anatomical Textbook The Anatomical Basis of Medical Practice (1971) on Display at the Attractive Specimen Exhibition
An old, well-worn anatomy textbook is on display in a glass case. As you pause to look through its pages, you realise that the models illustrating anatomy in this book are Playboy models. In her exhibition Attractive Specimen, photographic artist Johanna Naukkarinen brings a rare and controversial anatomy textbook to Mältinranta Gallery and explores its possible connections to the reasons why women’s health remains marginalised in medicine.
The media have recently highlighted gender biases in medicine. Many relatively common diseases that particularly affect women remain under-researched, and in some emergencies, life-threatening symptoms that are more typical in women go unrecognised.
For a decade, Johanna Naukkarinen has explored in her art the complex relationship between women and historical medical imagery. In this imagery, female figures are often depicted in a more eroticised manner than male figures, in accordance with the art-historical conventions of their time. This highlights how medical knowledge is shaped by the cultural norms of its time. In works that play with the aesthetics of the history of science, Naukkarinen brings to light perplexing phenomena from the history of medicine that nevertheless resonate with the experiences of many women today.
The Anatomical Basis of Medical Practice (1971) is a textbook created by Duke University professors R. Frederick Becker, James S. W. Wilson, and John A. Gehweiler with the aim of updating the teaching materials for first-year medical students. The book had a short lifespan: when readers discovered that its pages presented female anatomy through pin-up photographs taken by Playboy photographers Alice and Peter Gowland, the ensuing controversy put the book in the headlines and made it a target of the feminist movement of the time. The authors’ sexist views of women, embedded in the textbook’s text, also provoked outrage at a time when the proportion of women among medical students was rising sharply.
A copy of the book from the first and only edition of its publishing is on display in Johanna Naukkarinen’s exhibition Attractive Specimen at Mältinranta Gallery. In the form of imaginary health posters, Naukkarinen analyses the book’s startling images and the reactions they provoked at the time. She highlights the book’s most sexist images and ‘lessons’, and, drawing in part on the expertise of thoracic surgeon Nelli Nurminen, examines why pin-up photographs are unsuitable as medical teaching material.
The Anatomical Basis of Medical Practice serves as Naukkarinen’s link between centuries-old medical representations of women and the present day. What significance do these representations have for the gender biases that persists in medicine today, through which women have repeatedly been depicted as erotic ‘others’ rather than as a neutral representation of the ‘human’?
The exhibition has been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the Finnish Cultural Foundation (Southwest Finland Regional Fund), and an anonymous donor.