Beyond the Gallop

Beyond the Gallop is a photographic and multimedia work about hobby horsing as a contemporary youth culture, a self-organised sport and a space for finding one’s identity. The series looks past the first visual impression: girls and young women jump obstacles on home-made or bought hobby horses, practise movement sequences, train discipline, precision and expression. What may at first seem unusual or playful to outsiders reveals itself from within as a complex social world.

Hobby horsing originated in Finland and has since become visible in many European countries. The movement sits between sport, performance and collective imagination. It combines physical effort with fantasy, competition with community, seriousness with play. It is precisely this mix that makes the phenomenon so interesting: it resists simple categories and raises the question of which forms of youth culture society takes seriously, and which it does not.

A central aspect of the work is the connection between the digital and the analogue world. Many participants first discover hobby horsing on TikTok, Instagram or YouTube. There they watch others jump, train, fail, improve, design horses and attend tournaments. Social media becomes training room, stage, archive and meeting place. Girls who at first know each other only through comments, likes, messages and videos later meet in real life at competitions. Digital contacts turn into friendships that reach across cities and countries.

At a time when Europe is marked by political and social tension, these self-organised connections are particularly powerful. The friendships do not grow out of institutions but out of shared passion, digital closeness and physical encounter. Hobby horsing thus also becomes an image of a young European community: informal, connected, vulnerable and real.

At the same time, the digital space remains ambivalent. It can be a refuge, a stage and a place of self-empowerment, but also a target. Online, the girls are often confronted with ridicule, hate comments, sexualised reactions and demeaning language. The work is interested in this tension: how can a space that enables freedom and belonging also make people vulnerable? Why are youth cultures read as female so quickly smiled at or dismissed? And what does it mean to remain visible anyway?

The camera moves between observation and closeness. It shows training sessions, tournaments, preparations, jumps, portraits and quiet moments. The aim is not to present hobby horsing as a curiosity or a spectacle. The pictures look for concentration, vulnerability, pride, discipline, friendship and self-assertion. The work refuses irony and condescension. It takes the participants and their world seriously.

In an exhibition context, the photographic series can be extended by video and text. Short video sequences of jumps and training make the physicality, the rhythm and the athletic dimension visible. A textual layer can take up the digital reactions, misunderstandings and hostility the community faces.

Beyond the Gallop is therefore not simply a work about an unusual sport. It is a work about identity, digital belonging, resilience, friendship and the courage to inhabit a space of one’s own before the outside world has learned to understand it.