Matti Aikio

Matti Aikio is a Sámi artist with roots in reindeer herding. He explores the intersection of modern Western society and indigenous cultures, their relative worldviews and conceptions of space and time, with a particular interest in the conflict between their use of natural resources, arising from their fundamentally different approaches to nature. Combining moving image, sound, text, and photography, Aikio raises issues about the Sámi truth and the reconciliation process, cultural appropriation and Sámi self-determination.

Aikio’s new work for Helsinki Biennial 2023 was a video and sound installation located inside one of the old gunpowder magazines on Vallisaari Island. The work is informed by his cultural background and lived experience, and it addresses conflicts around the use of natural resources, nature conservation, fossil-free energy production and more broadly human relations with other living beings. Understanding nature as something outside or external to the human realm, as an object of extraction or conservation, is revealed as a blind spot that inevitably affects the way nature is understood and treated.

Matti Aikio

Co-Commissioned by Helsinki Biennial and TBA21–Academy, produced by HAM Helsinki Art Museum/Helsinki Biennial 2023.

Aikio’s works have recently been on display in the following exhibitions: Unfinished Histories, Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm (2022); Mäccmõš, maccâm, máhccan – The Homecoming, National Museum of Finland, Helsinki (2021–2022); and Nils-Aslak Valkeapää – Áillohaš, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (2020–2021).

Aikio is one of the TBA21-Academy’s Ocean Fellows 2022 and the Sámi Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics 2022–2023.

Oikos

2023

video and sound installation

Sound: Miro Mantere

Joik: Niko Valkeapää

Thank you: Kone Foundation

Co-Commissioned by Helsinki Biennial and TBA21–Academy, produced by HAM Helsinki Art Museum/Helsinki Biennial 2023