Alma Heikkilä is a Helsinki-based artist who depicts things that cannot be experienced through the human sensorium. These include microbial life forms too small to be perceived in everyday life, forest ecosystems where important processes are located underground and inside plants, and large-scale phenomena that happen at a speed and scale beyond human comprehension.

Working mainly with paint and plaster and using techniques that allow pigments and liquids to spontaneously form images on surfaces, Heikkilä understands her artistic practice as a collaboration with materials and other phenomena.

Her new work coadapted with (2023) for Vallisaari Island consisted of a sculpture enclosed within canvases that created a space-within-a-space in the forest. Rainwater mixed with plant dyes dripped onto the plaster, changing the colour of the sculpture over the course of the summer. The dyes were infusions of plant species growing on the island and elsewhere in Helsinki.

A polyester screen and roundworms made from industrial silicone. Inhaling microbes. A hand touches a wooden chip, shedding dead skin. My warm, moist body, my urge to move, to look, to gather material and information – to decide, to move along.

This body sits down and looks at how the brown liquid is absorbed into the porous plaster.  I feel like my body is far less permeable – but that isn’t completely true, is it?

Are there insects hollowing out the core of the tree trunk? I cannot hear it nor see it. Are they gnawing at the mycelium of Fomitopsis Pinicola? Living and decaying materials become intermixed. Unknown parts of insects, living and dead bacteria, pollen…

From this spot, I will take something very tangible with me. It will change me again; it will become a part of me.

Enormous, white, computer-generated hands that are severed from a body, bloodlessly, floating in outer space. It looks like they are holding the Earth. Detached human limbs thriving in outer space? The Hands could be caring parents to the planet, using their power and knowledge to nurture and improve the biosphere.

Maybe a bird will try to eat the silicone worm.

The forest is a place of risk; things that I cannot predict can happen here. I might and most likely will harm the environment that I am so curious about. Everything is already here, more than I can ever know of. I miss the museum, its clarity and simplicity. Space that is intended for humans and their art.

Just beneath the soil, in semi-darkness, a gentle tip of a nematode might touch my foot.

the microplastic from car tyres, from my shoes,

the coffee, the picture of an art event on my phone, a WhatsApp message from mum

the inconceivable beauty of the decaying tree trunk

Alma Heikkilä’s recent solo exhibitions of hers include Tempesta gallery (Italy 2021) Graz Kunstverein (Austria 2020), Kiasma (Finland, 2019), Casco Art Institute (the Netherlands, 2018), Gallery Ama (Finland, 2017, and 2013), and EMMA (Finland, 2015). She has participated in group exhibitions at Malmö Art Museum (Sweden, 2020), Moss (Norway 2020), Art Encounters Biennial (Romania 2019), Fiskars Village Art & Design Biennale (Finland 2019), Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm, Sweden, 2018), Norrköpings Konstmuseum (Sweden, 2018), and at the Gwangju Biennale (South Korea, 2016). Her work is held in numerous public as well as private collections in Finland, Italy, and Sweden. In 2014 she was awarded the Ducat Prize of the Finnish Art Society.

plaster, plant ink, industrial ink, rainwater, pine wood, metal, polyester, silicone, linseed oil, earth pigments, epoxy resin, sun

Comissioned by HAM/Helsinki Biennial 2023

Alma Heikkilä

Asunción Molinos Gordo is a Spanish researcher and artist strongly influenced by the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies in her questioning of the categories that define ‘innovation’ in mainstream discourses today. Aiming to generate a less urban-centric way of understanding progress, and with a focus on contemporary peasantry, she has produced work reflecting on land usage, nomad architecture, farmers’ strikes, bureaucracy on territory, transformation of rural labour, biotechnology, and global food trade.

For Helsinki Biennial, she created a new edition of ¡Cuánto río allá arriba! (2021), a sculptural ensemble incorporating elements of water pottery, and deploying the gestural potential of assemblage. Molinos Gordo’s work borrows its title from the poem El Cántaro Roto (1958) by Octavio Paz, in which he exclaimed “¡Cuánto río allá arriba!” [How many rivers above!] to question the myth of progress that disguises reality. The work pays tribute to the mindset behind the thousands of uses and forms of water pottery conceived by farming communities and proposes an assemblage of the remains of an ancestral ethical system of cooperation and solidarity that has governed the planet’s resources until recently.

In December 2020, water – a common good and source of life throughout the planet – began trading on the Wall Street stock market. At that time, I was immersed in research on the ways in which water has been shared by the imazighen communities that settled in the latter-day region of Valencia in Spain. Back in the 8th century, peasant Berber families from different part of North Africa built a system of irrigation channels, distributing water in an equitable manner to ensure social harmony among the tribes and new settlers.

These social groups created a hydraulic system that was extremely advanced in terms of water justice and social responsibility. To me it was incredible to see the contrast between these two forms of technology. On one hand, the very elaborate and complex contemporary financial markets were privatizing every drop of water very effectively, while on the other, ancient Moorish water technologies specifically sought to avoid conflicts by securing proportional access to all and establishing social peace among the tribes.

I started expanding my research into other water technologies that employ irrigation channels and water pottery. Pitchers, jugs, canteens, basins, rhytons…all are receptacles used for the transport, storage and consumption of water. Loaded with playful customs and symbols, they simulate the idea of abundance, their varied morphologies paying tribute to other forms of life on Earth, reflecting this in two fundamental precepts: the universal right of human beings to quench their thirst and that of their animals, and the right to water their crops.

Molinos Gordo’s work has been exhibited at venues including Art Jameel, Dubai, UAE; IVAM, Valencia, Spain; Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK), Delfina Foundation (London, UK), ARNOLFINI (Bristol, UK), The Townhouse Gallery (Cairo, EG), Darat Al Funun (Amman, JO), Tranzit (Prague, CZ), Cappadox Festival (Uchisar-Turkey), The Finnish Museum of Photography (Helsinki, FI), Museo Carrillo Gil (Mexico), MAZ Museo de Arte de Zapopan (Guadalajara, MX), MUSAC (León, ES), CA2M (Madrid, ES), CAB (Burgos, ES), Matadero (Madrid, ES) and La Casa Encendida (Madrid, ES), among others.

Potters: 
Arturo Mora Reflejo Metalico, Manises
Juan Carlos Iñesta, Domanises, Manises
Ana Pales, Cerámicas Tevisan, Manises

Asunción Molinos Gordo

Dineo Seshee Bopape is an artist who lives and works in Johannesburg. She is known for her use of soil and other organic material as a base for multisensory, multidimensional work that connects deeply with the earth. In addition to her packed earth installations, Seshee Bopape also works with drawing, video, and sound to create a rich practice connecting to memory, belonging, and place.

Helsinki Biennial 2023 presented a continuation of Seshee Bopape’s use of earth as her material. Like her previous work, it continued invoking connections both to land and family, but now through a new departure – a sculptural form of a billboard made of rammed earth that is textured with organic material and rocks of various sizes.

The new work, I Re-member Mama, seeks to find a path to remembering and re-membering, through fragmented parts of personal and collective family histories.

What began as a political enquiry soon led to a realisation of a spiritual quest and an ancestral longing. Working with soil and clay has offered the artist a way to remember her grandmother’s stories, expanding also to other grandmothers, as well as the waters and the earth itself, which feed, nurture, house and support us all. The work is a call for healing, drawing attention to the memory of the land, and the power of people’s reparative acts to protect natural environments and all that is sacred.

Excerpt from a divination session 03/02/2023, 11 am – 12.15 pm

It’s like you were saying, two dimensions in one world. There is a process of ‘the return to mama’ where the lunar energies would stand outside. It’s actually three dimensions to me… the lunar moon, the crescent moon in one dimension, and the Earth in another. And then there’s the top one; the conscious or the manifested world.

The moon would be the super conscious, the elemental, and the six sides of a die are the conscious unfoldment of a process on a multi-dimensional level, where the lunar energies influence the earth. From this tent/ndumba, energies from that dimension are projected from the subconscious into the other state where they manifest as courage to go seek, to go seek. To take the trip to discover who and what the mother is –  her story. In that leap you are protected – you will be rewarded.

Many have made that trip, symbolized by the house with many rooms. It has brought justice, or it has highlighted inequalities. And it is also a three-dimensional process. It is not something that will cease to exist once you move through it, but instead represents the others who have made the trip before. Also because it’s not a full or a new moon, it’s a process that has yet to reach fullness. That is what it is for me… this return to mama. It’s a state that is taking place on multidimensional levels. It is guided by a very strong lunar force. And it is the path of courage and it’s a path that is open and eternal.

I hope that works, Grandmother, with your own intuitions. May there be light, Grandmother.

Seshee Bopape’s works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world. Some of her recent solo exhibitions include Born in the first light of the morning [moswara’marapo], Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, Italy (2022); The Soul Expanding Ocean #3, Ocean Space, Venice, Italy (2022); Lerato le le golo (…la go hloka bo kantle), Secession Vienna, AT (2022); The Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA at VCU), Richmond, Virginia, USA (2021); Sedibeng, it comes with the rain, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, UK (2019); When Spirituality was a Baby, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2018; and Lerole: footnotes. (The struggle of memory against forgetting), Sfeir-Semler Gallery Hamburg, Germany (2018).

Some of her recent group exhibitions include venues and events such as Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany; National Museum of Cardiff, Wales; FRAC Poitou-Charentes, Anglouême, France; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; SFMOMA, San Francisco, USA; Arsenale, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; Ford Foundation Gallery, New York, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Canada; 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany; Sharjah Biennale 13: Tamawuj, Sharjah, UAE, to mention just a few.

She was the main prize winner of the Future Generation Art Prize 2017 awarded by PinchukArtCentre, the recipient of a 2010 Columbia University Toby Fund Award, and the winner of 2008 MTN New Contemporaries Award. She was awarded the Artes Mundi 9 Prize by National Museum Cardiff, Wales in 2019.

Production: Collaboratorio, Vihdin Betoni Oy

Courtesy of the artist. Thanks to Markus Reymann and TBA21–Academy.

Dineo Seshee Bopape

Emilija Škarnulytė is a Lithuanian-born nomadic artist and filmmaker. Working between the realms of the documentary and the imaginary, Škarnulytė makes films and immersive installations exploring deep time and invisible structures. Her topics range from the cosmic and geological to the ecological and political.

Helsinki Biennial 2023 presented a new commissioned film installation, Hypoxia, which refers to a condition of oxygen starvation. Drawing inspiration from the Baltic Sea, the piece is a meditation on extinction, future archaeology, and deep time, speculating on the contemporary scientific conditions and technologies related to deep-sea mining and ocean mapping (LIDAR, elaborated Landsat landscape data, and polarimetry) from the imaginary perspective of a future archaeologist.

By examining the ocean basin from what she calls an “alien archaeology perspective”, Škarnulytė aims to reconstruct mythologies and beliefs of the past and present, looking at them from the vantage point of the future.

The film weaves together various subjects: the Baltic Sea anomaly, a spacecraft that reportedly lies at the bottom of the Baltic Sea; the anthropogenic phenomenon of hypoxia, i.e., oxygen depletion that causes dead zones to appear in seas; and the Lithuanian myth of the sea goddess Jūratė, whose amber palace beneath the waves was destroyed because of the heroine’s dalliance with a human. Myth meets science and science fiction beneath the waves.

Hypoxia. Dead zones form as oxygen levels are depleted. Suffocation is becoming the new normal. The sea surface is ‘boiling’ with methane bubbles. Our political choices have produced after-shocks such as the Nord Stream explosion, causing the worst natural gas leak ever. Remnants of our defence and health industries lie at the bottom of the sea – in the form of Cold War myths and radioactive waste, from which it will take decades to recover. Humans have heaped a massive burden of hazards upon the environment, causing hypoxia that is devastating for the sea.

Hypoxia weaves together disparate subjects of narrative to comment on the hard-to-fathom findings that are prevalent everywhere in our contemporary reality. The first subject is the ‘Baltic Sea Anomaly’, a speculative sci-fi scenario of what lies at the bottom of this deadly and polluted body of water. The second strand of narrative harks back to ancient myth. The chief deity in Lithuanian mythology, the thunder god Perkūnas, had a daughter named Jūratė who lived in an amber palace beneath the Baltic Sea. Her love affair with a human caused her father to smash the palace, and the amber washed up on Lithuanian shores is still widely known as ‘Jūratė’s Tears’. In reality, these are the captured carbon relics of an ancient forest submerged beneath the waves long ago.

Our myths have long been stand-ins for natural phenomena and human desire, our dreams and stories mixing with the forces and landscapes that surround us. As we destroy this world with all the reckless bravado our ascendant species can muster, these myths come back with the vengeance of angry gods through ecological collapse. Measured and traced with the most modern of instruments, our very human and very abusive relationship with the Baltic Sea invites these ancient deities to return with new stories of divine retribution and freshly wept tears.

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

In 2022, Škarnulytė participated in the group exhibition Penumbra organized by Fondazione In Between Art Film at the 59th Venice Biennale. Škarnulytė represented Lithuania at the XXII Triennale di Milano and her work featured in the Baltic Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture. With solo exhibitions at Tate Modern (2021), Kunsthaus Pasquart (2021), Den Frie (2021), National Gallery of Art in Vilnius (2021), CAC (2015) and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien (2017), she has participated in group shows at Ballroom Marfa, Seoul Museum of Art, Kadist Foundation, and the First Riga Biennial.

Her films are represented in the IFA, Kadist Foundation and Centre Pompidou collections and have been screened at the Serpentine Gallery, UK, Centre Pompidou, France, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York and at numerous film festivals including in Visions du Réel, HOT DOCS, Rotterdam, Busan, and Oberhausen.

Škarnulytė is the winner of the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize, and she has also received numerous other prizes including the Kino der Kunst Project Award, Munich (2017); Spare Bank Foundation DNB Artist Award (2017), and the National Lithuanian Art Prize for Young Artists (2016). She was recently nominated as one the candidates for the Ars Fennica art award 2023.

Written and directed by Emilija Škarnulytė

DOP: Derek Spencer Howard, Emilija Škarnulytė

Thank you: Andrius Šiaulys; Arūnas Gelūnas; Baltic Sea Nature & Heritage Protection Association; Egidijus Pavilonis; Elena Pranckėnaitė; Eric Cordes; Erik Vojevodin; International Dialogue on Underwater Munitions; Jeremy McKane; Juan Raya Rodríguez; Klaipėda University Underwater Research Centre; Klaipėda University Sea Research Institute; Linas Duoblys; Nerijus Blažauskas; Palanga Amber Museum; Pisces VI Submarine; Sabine Kerkau; Scott Waters; Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO); TBA21; Terrance P. Long; Zita Rasuolė Gasiūnaitė; Schmidt Ocean Institute

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

Emilija Škarnulytė

Jenna Sutela is a Berlin-based artist who works with biological and computational systems – including the human microbiome and artificial neural networks – to create sculptures, images, and music. At the core of her practice is a renunciation of anthropocentric hierarchies and a shift toward decentralized forms of intelligence and organization.

For Helsinki Biennial 2023, Sutela presented Pond Brain, which consists of a water-filled bronze bowl expanding upon the shape of the artist’s own head. The instrument invites the viewer to rub it in order to make it ‘sing’. When played, it interacts with sound produced using machine learning technology to create an ever-emerging soundscape based on signals from the wider environment, including sounds from outer space and under the sea.

Pond Brain was produced in collaboration with Copenhagen Contemporary.

Hydrogen emerged in the Big Bang and oxygen in the cores of stars more massive than the Sun. Enormous amounts of water, in gaseous form, exist in the vast stellar nurseries of our galaxy. The origins of ponds are in the stars. A pond seems to say, “as above, so below,” turning its image of the world upside down.

The title of my artwork, Pond Brain, alludes to the ‘alt’ cybernetist Stafford Beer’s idea about a pond ecosystem as a homeostatic controller. Beer was looking at how ponds are better than computers at reconfiguring themselves when confronted with emergent, chaotic, and unpredictable phenomena. Like him, I am interested in systems open to the wider environment – a world made of brains.

Pond Brain is an instrument and a fountain: a bowl of rainwater made out of bronze that can be played or activated by touch (aka statue rubbing). The shape of the pond is reminiscent of a head. It is my neuroplastic portrait. In the spirit of a Chinese spouting bowl, or a German Wasserspringschale, interaction with the object not only produces musical vibration, but also creates patterns on the surface of the water inside it. As the sonic vibrations increase, water droplets start to bounce up from the surface.

Sounds from the pond resonate with an artificial neural network trained to respond to environmental and interplanetary sounds. The network tunes into sonic frequencies from the bowl and plays back an array of alien resonations. As sound flows around in homeostatic loops through the air and through different machine learning models, which exude an air of alternative dimensions, it is constantly transforming and thus exhibiting a life cycle of its own.

Sutela’s work has been presented at museums and art contexts internationally, including Haus der Kunst, Munich (2022); Castello di Rivoli (2022); Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2022); Shanghai Biennale (2021); Liverpool Biennial (2021); Kunsthall Trondheim (2020); Serpentine Galleries, London (2019); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019). She was a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019-21.

Installation (bronze, water, sound, and light)

Working group: Victor Riley Shepardson, Vanda Skácalová, and Finley Stewart

Bronze casting at Bildgiesserei Hermann Noack, Berlin

Pond Brain is produced in collaboration with Copenhagen Contemporary.

Jenna Sutela

TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS New Cosmological Models for Survival

Suzanne Treister was initially recognized as a painter but became a pioneer in digital media and web-based art in the early 1990s. Her extensive body of work comprises eccentric narratives and unconventional bodies of research revealing structures that bind together power, identity, and knowledge systems. Her projects consist of fantastical reinterpretations of given taxonomies and histories that examine the existence of covert, unseen forces at work in the world, whether corporate, military, or paranormal.

Installed in a wooden cabin on Vallisaari Island, Technoshamanic Systems (2020-21) presented microcosmic non-colonialist plans for a techno-spiritual imaginary of alternative visions of survival on earth and inhabitation of the cosmos. Treister’s work encourages the unification of art, spirituality, science, and technology through hypnotic visions of our potential communal futures alongside those of possible extraterrestrial entities or civilizations.

Treister’s watercolour paintings were accompanied by a new AR component in which the Interplanetary Meditation and Biospheres Islands appear to float high up in the sky.

On the 8th of April 2020, I found myself reading a newspaper article headlined “Trump order encourages US to mine the moon. Executive order says US will oppose any effort to bar it from removing chunks of moon, Mars or elsewhere in space”. The article noted that the US had never signed the 1979 moon treaty which stipulates that any activities in space should conform to international law. In 2015 the US Congress had passed a law allowing companies to use resources from the moon and asteroids.

In January I had been to the exhibition Moving to Mars at London’s Design Museum, which showed models of potential Martian settlements. Looking deeper into the ambitions of the private space industry, of Elon Musk, Richard Branson and numerous private ventures and corporations, it became clear that the history of colonization was far from over and that a sector of humanity was working towards a potential occupation and destruction of the rest of the Universe. Assuming the development of the associated technologies could not be stopped, there needed to be not only movements against oppression and destruction on Earth, but also people developing models and ethical frameworks for potential non-colonialist techno-spiritual futures of humanity in space.

Imagining positive visions for the future of life on our planet, this project is my attempt to contribute to the emerging fields of astrocognition, astroethics and astrobioethics.

N.B. My use of the term Technoshamanic in the title of this project aims to expand and redefine its current definition, enabling it to act cosmically as a term that encompasses a worldview where technology, instead of being driven by mainstream economic, corporate and governmental forces, is engineered and redirected in new ways for global positive futures.

Treister’s recent solo and group exhibitions include: 7th Athens Biennale, Greece; Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland; 34th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts; Kunstmuseum Appenzell, Switzerland (2021); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Yerevan Biennial, Armenia (2020); Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2019); Busan Biennale, Korea; CAPC, Bordeaux, France; EKKM, Tallinn, Estonia; CCCB, Barcelona; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2018); IMMA, Dublin; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada (2017); P.P.O.W., New York; Liverpool Biennial, UK; V&A Museum, London; Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden; Bard Hessel Museum, NY, USA (2016); ICA, London, England; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunstverein München, Germany; Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA), Netherlands; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; HMKV, Dortmund, Germany (2015); 10th Shanghai Biennale; 8th Montréal Biennale (2014)

site specific installation: Wooden recyclable forest hut structure, 185 digital prints from original watercolours – each 21 x 29.7 cm, augmented reality.

The project comprises Project Diagrams, Earth Eco Systems and Architectures, Reinvented Technologies, Interplanetary Social Structures, Designs for Spacecraft, Apparel, Interplanetary Space Habitations, Interplanetary Meditation and Biospheres Islands, Crystal Architectures, Vultures, Rituals, Stars and Visions.

Courtesy the artist, Annely Juda Fine Art, London and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Suzanne Treister

Ahmed Al-Nawas and Minna Henriksson are Helsinki-based artists and art workers who have been collaborating since 2015. Al-Nawas’s praxis focuses on archival research and collaborative knowledge production, while Henriksson’s work relates to leftist, anti-racist and feminist struggles, often drawing from real historical events.

For Helsinki Biennial 2023, the artists continued and expanded their critical deconstruction of national identity, focusing on the role of forestry in the project of nation building in Finland. In addition to raising questions about forestry policy in Finland, their work’s location connected it with the geopolitics, economics and logistics of moving raw materials through the Suez, Gibraltar and Bosphorus channels, as well as the Saimaa channel shared by Finland and Russia.

The work Green Gold (2023) was experienced as an AR piece in which you see a boat pulling a large timber raft towards Kustaanmiekka channel, which lies between the islands of Vallisaari and Suomenlinna.

On a guided tour of Vallisaari Island with a former resident, Hannu Hurskainen, we learned that ships entering Helsinki used to dump timber and other waste into the sea just off Vallisaari. We imagined the shores dotted with discarded pieces of wood drifting in the sea. Inhabitants of the island would collect the timber and build stacks on the rocks to dry it for firewood – this was back when all heating and cooking on the island was wood-fuelled. Cutting down trees was forbidden, as it is now, with local flora being strictly protected by the enterprise governing state-owned land and water resources, Metsähallitus.

Recently, the practice of timber rafting has returned to Finland, and rafting volumes are predicted to increase in years to come. It feels like a strange mirage from days gone by. The celebrated ‘green gold’ that brought prosperity to Finland in bygone days masked unsavoury realities such as the hazardous labour conditions endured by timber rafters the ‘tukkijätkä’s, and the tragic erasure of forests set adrift in massive rafts, leaving nothing but stumps behind.

For a long time, timber rafts disappeared from our visual reality, with Finland declaring its aim to become carbon neutral and the first fossil-free welfare society by 2035. All this while, Finland has been importing an annual total of about ten million cubic metres of timber from Russia. Since Russia’s attack on Ukraine, trade routes have been blocked and Finnish industry has had to increase logging within its own territory. As a result, Finland’s carbon sink has collapsed.

What does the timber raft of today and tomorrow represent? Will national romanticism yet again divert our attention to the myth of the heroic log rafter and the prospect of forestry-derived monetary gains now that the industry is highly mechanized, society is increasingly privatized, and the winnings are hardly shared by all?

Ahmed Al-Nawas and Minna Henriksson have been collaborating on various projects since 2015. In their practice, they engage in a critical reappraisal of history, politicizing it through art, often with crafts as a focal element in their work. Their joint exhibitions include GENESIS, Serlachius Museum Gustaf in Mänttä, Finland (2023) and Fake Star, Turku Art Museum, Finland (2020).

Commissioned by HAM/Helsinki Biennial 2023

Ahmed Al-Nawas & Minna Henriksson

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is a London-based artist who works predominantly in animation, sound, video game development, and performance, creating interactive spaces. Their practice focuses on intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell the stories of Black Trans people.

As part of Helsinki Biennial 2023, Brathwaite-Shirley invited visitors to take part in role-playing performance events and an installation exploring a new mythology for Vallisaari Island, taking participants on a journey to meet the various characters and scenarios that guide their collaborative decision-making.

The characters took the form of physical sculptures on the island, and you could also listen to their background stories online. Live events took place over several days in June, August and September 2023. The sculptures and the online content could be experienced throughout the duration of the biennial. Scroll down for more information on the live events.

It must have started with a group of people having fun. They didn’t have a name for themselves yet but the rituals they performed for each other slowly began to solidify into beliefs. A doorway known as ‘The Path of Passing Through’ was erected for those who wished to pass from one way of living to another. It was the first of its kind in the old world.

Word of the spiritual doorway spread, inciting pilgrimages to the doorway. The journey, when it came to a close, would allow you to begin life anew. To start again. It was rebranded as The Gate of Rebirth, Resurrection and Reawakening and those that had been through the pilgrimage of rebirth gained a deific resonance. The resonance began to make people move differently. Other religions saw this mesmerizing power and begun incorporating the pilgrimage, or the idea of self-pilgrimage, into their own system of beliefs. A union was born, a moment of understanding.

Then began a period in which the reasons to go on a pilgrimage began to be redefined, still keeping the idea of a journey but limiting what kind of journey and who you could become after it. Many of those who took the journey for the original purpose were no longer welcomed back to where they started. For some the journeys began to become one-way trips.

Until one day. Altogether. The idea of the journey stopped. And when the memory of those who had taken the journey was completely buried along with their bodies, the doorway was destroyed.

Now in the new world those journeys, those memories, have begun to resurface. A new time has emerged for the pilgrimage to The Gate of Rebirth.

Brathwaite-Shirley’s work has featured in solo exhibitions and performances at institutions such as David Kordansky, LA (2022) Project Arts Centre, Ireland (2022); Skäneskonstförening, Malmö, Sweden (2022); Arebyte Gallery, London (2021); QUAD, Derby, England (2021); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2021); Tate Modern, London (2020); Focal Point Gallery, London (2020); Science Gallery, London (2020); and MU Hybrid Art House, London (2020).

Their work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as Julia StoschekFoundation, Berlin (2022); Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich (2019); Les Urbaines, Lausanne (2019); and Barbican, London (2018).

storied site-specific pilgrimage, site-specific installation, web pilgrimage

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

Diana Policarpo is an artist and composer who works between London and Lisbon. Through speculative transdisciplinary research, she investigates gender politics, economic structures, health, and interspecies relations. Policarpo’s performances and installations examine experiences of vulnerability and empowerment associated with acts of exposing oneself to the capitalist world.

For Helsinki Biennial 2023, Policarpo presented a large-scale installation that creates a case study of mapping colonial histories through the tracking of natural biodiversity. The work originated from a research trip to the Portuguese-administered Ilhas Selvagens (Savage Islands) in the North Atlantic Ocean.

The rock-shaped sculptures with embedded video and sound tell stories that are simultaneously factual and fictitious, based equally on science and science fiction. We hear the voices of the island and its inhabitants narrating their roles in the stories and mythologies of the islands.

The title Ciguatera refers to poisoning that occurs after eating fish contaminated with accumulated ciguatoxins. This in turn results from the fish feeding on toxic macroalgae containing Gambierdiscus. Outbreaks of ciguatera are well documented in the Savage Islands area, yet the exact cause of the intermittent increase in the release of the toxins resulting in poisonings up the food chain remains unknown, although nuclear testing has been suggested as one possible cause. It is an example of various types of anthropogenic damage caused by humans treating the world as their property.

I am an island but I’m not really an island.

I’m a multitude of identities and bodies, within the same formation.
We have evolved together in total isolation.
My name is Selvagem, but I prefer to be called Aea.
My body is made of the remains of submarine volcanic peaks.
Innumerable myths and legends are preserved in my fossils.

I have evolved in an entirely different way.

Before the First Door had opened, there was gold embedded in my mantle by showers of meteorites. The impacts of these storms were so deep that I still bear the scars, like craters on an ocean Moon. Petrified matter, carrying deep time in their intricate embrace, coagulated the past into an animated history, forming fossil-like patterns.

I am a rift in the surface of materiality.

European traders once thought I was a ghost.
Some erratic rocks rising up next to an island of sirens and lizards. These are the very same rocks where Perseus had laid Medusa’s head to rest among the seaweed.
A forest of corals had grown around me like a crown of thorns.

Excerpt from Diana Policarpo’s video work When the Sea Swallows in Ciguatera, 2022

Ciguatera was originally Commissioned by TBA21-Academy and coproduced by TBA21-Academy and Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, in collaboration with Instituto Gulbenkian Ciência. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann + Silva gallery.

Policarpo’s work has been exhibited around the world, including solo shows at venues such as Kunsthal Aarhus (Upcoming); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Ocean Space, Venice; RADIUS, Delft; CRAC, Sète; Kunsthall Trondheim; Galeria Municipal do Porto; Galeria Lehmann + Silva, Porto; GNRtion, Braga; Kunstverein Leipzig; and Kunsthall Baden-Baden.

She has recently exhibited, performed and screened her work at Serralves Museum, Porto; Maus Hábitos, Porto, Galeria Francisco Fino; Lisbon; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Elvas (MACE); Chiado 8, Lisbon; Mars Gallery, Melbourne; Peninsula Gallery, New York; W139, Amsterdam; Kunsthall Oslo; LUX-Moving IMage, ICA, Tenderpixel Gallery and Cafe OTO in London.

Policarpo was the winner of Prémio Novos Artistas Fundação EDP 2019 and the illy Present Future Prize 2021.

Including:
Breath Movements 1, 2 & 3, 2022, Ten-channel sound installation
Collaboration with Odete

When the Sea Swallows, 2022, HD video, colour, sound
Narration and field recordings by Diana Policarpo

The Fourth Door, 2022, HD video, colour, sound
Narration by Crista Alfaiate Soundtrack by Diana Policarpo

Toxic blooms, 2022, Two-channel HD video, colour, sound 
Narration by Syma Tariq, Rodrigo Vaiapraia, João Abreu, André Godinho, Soundtrack by Diana Policarpo

Microcosms I – VII, 2022, HD video, colour

Composition for sound installation: Diana Policarpo & Odete 
Videography: Diana Policarpo, Bernado Gaeiras, Mariana Silva
Color grading: Rita Lamas
Sound design and mix: Diana Policarpo, Marcelo Tavares
Voice over: Syma Tariq, Rodrigo Vaiapraia, André Godinho, João Abreu, Crista Alfaiate, Diana Policarpo
Post-production: Studio Kino Sound Studio
Fabrication: Rinaldo Rinaldi studio
Studio Assistant: Bruno Bogarim
Production and Project Management: DH Office

Commissioned by TBA21–Academy. Co-produced by TBA21–Academy and Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, in collaboration with Instituto Gulbenkian Ciência

Diana Policarpo

INTERPRT is a research agency that engages with environmental justice and human rights. Through spatial and visual investigations by its team of academics, architects, and spatial designers, working in collaboration with civil society organizations, international lawyers, scientists, NGOs, journalists, and leading cultural institutions worldwide, they focus on the representation of difficult-to-trace environmental destruction and resistance to extractive projects mounted by indigenous, minority and marginalized groups.

In their new work for Helsinki Biennial 2023, INTERPRT asked if the Nordic truth commissions can sufficiently expose and examine the colonial history of assimilation, land dispossession and other forms of state violence that continue in the present in the form of green colonialism. The project is a further exploration of INTERPRT’s long-standing collective research and advocacy concerns.

For Helsinki, INTERPRT produced a multimedia report and installation combining visual and cartographic evidence, environmental data, spatial methodologies with field research, interviews, and archival sources. In particular, the project tells the spatial story of the ongoing legal struggle between Sámi reindeer herder communities and wind power projects in Øyfjellet in Nordland county in Northern Norway. The aim is to create a new form of data journalism project in cooperation with Sámi journalists, archaeologists, and researchers that critically engages with transitional and climate justice in the colonial present.

INTERPRT’s installation was displayed at HAM Helsinki Art Museum and Helsinki Central Library Oodi.

In 2018, INTERPRT’s Nabil Ahmed, together with the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), initiated the ‘Fighting Environmental Crime in West Papua’ workshop for OCA’s ‘Let the River Flow’ exhibition, which dealt with the role of Sámi artists in the Alta Action and contemporary artistic positions on eco-political indigenous struggles and rights to self-determination. The Alta Action (c. 1978 – 82) involved Sámi and non-Sámi activists staging massive protests against the construction of a hydroelectric power plant on the Alta River.

The workshop brought together West Papuan leaders, and human rights defenders fighting for self-determination in dialogue with their Sámi counterparts. We met at the Árdna – the Sámi cultural building of The Arctic University of Norway’s Centre for Sámi Studies in Tromsø. The workshop created the opportunity for our honoured guests from West Papua to share stories of their struggles against industrial mining and oppression by the Indonesian state, which INTERPRT has also been documenting since 2014.

At the Árdna hangs ‘The Crows/Garjjat’ (1981), an artwork on the Alta action by the Sámi artist Britta Marakatt-Labba. In the work, a long line of crows flies in from the distant horizon in a landscape of snow and ice. As the crows swoop down, they turn into police officers who attack the Sámi seated by their lavvos (shelters). Upon seeing ‘The Crows’, Mama Yosepha Alomang – a Papuan community leader who has led the resistance to mining on her ancestral land over many decades – said to us that this was also what happened to her people. Her words still resonate with us today.

INTERPRT’s recent international and institutional exhibitions include Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics, MACBA, Barcelona, Spain (2017); The Oceanic, NTU CCA, Singapore (2018); Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2018), Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2019); Biennale Warszawa, Warsaw, Poland (2020), The Ocean, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway (2021) and Mining the Abyss, Istanbul Biennale, Istanbul (2022).

Colonial Present: Counter-mapping the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in Sápmi

Co-investigators: Nabil Ahmed and Olga Lucko

3D development: Gwil Hughes and Mingxin Li

Remote sensing analysis: Paulo J. Murillo-Sandoval

Filming: Marius Reed, Nikolas Flotsky, Dixin Wang and Prerna Bishnoi

Video editing and production: Prerna Bishnoi and Filip Wesołowski

Video editing assistance: Gustav Gundvalsen

Thanks to: Hanne Svinsås Magga, Mattis Danielsen, Ole Henrik Kappfjell, Torstein Appfjell, Berit Kristin Hætta, Pål Gude Gudesen, Knut Helge Hurum, Ingjerd Tjelle, Sverre Fjellheim, Eva Maria Fjellheim, Ingrid Fadnes, Magnus Holmen, Manuela Panzacchi, Bernardo Brandão Niebuhr Dos Santos, Martinus Suijkerbuijk, Ernestine Boiling, and Katya García-Antón.

STUDIO INTERPRT is based at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art in the Faculty of Architecture and Design at NTNU.

INTERPRT

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.

I recall when I was young, I was told an anecdote about the Finnish sociologist Erik Allardt. As I remember it, he said, in the 1990s, that the conflict between the Sámi people and the Finnish nation state signifies that the Sámi people have not yet been fully assimilated. The assimilation process is not yet finalized. I find this to be an interesting interpretation of the conflict. It makes me think that conflict can be a positive sign. A conflict can mean that an indigenous group is still indigenous.

My Sámi family history is a history of conflict. I carry a trauma inherited from my great-great-grandfather, whose first wife died in prison in the aftermath of the Kautokeino rebellion of 1852. Just shortly prior to the rebellion, the border between Norway and Finland had been closed, blocking the seasonal migration of the nomadic Sámi reindeer herders. The closure of the border was partly prompted by complaints from Finnish settlers who had settled on Sámi lands near the Norwegian border.

My grandfather tried to protect his reindeer grazing lands against the forest industry and hydropower plants.

Modern society’s relationship with nature is schizophrenic. We try to solve massive problems caused by old human technology with new human technology. But we seem to be blind to the fact that there are not enough minerals for even one generation of electric cars on a global scale. Modern society is destroying ecosystems on indigenous lands for the sake of economic gains and fossil free energy. The very same modern society wants to strictly protect certain symbolic species like wolves or wolverines as proof that there is still wild nature left after all this industrial exploitation.

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.

Matti Aikio

Sasha Huber and Petri Saarikko are Helsinki-based artists who have been working on the Remedies project since 2010, exploring methods of self-help and medicinal healing in different geographical and cultural contexts.

For Helsinki Biennial 2023, the artists created a new site-specific installation marking the continuation of their ongoing project. The work was experienced by standing on the shore of one of the two freshwater ponds on Vallisaari Island.

Originally excavated by the army to serve as a freshwater well during Russian occupation, the artificial pond has since evolved into its own ecosystem, becoming an important hub for wellness, recreation, and joy for the inhabitants of the island – both humans and others.

The installation is accompanied by a short verse that raises questions about the landscape as a backdrop for human intervention. Is human presence an essential element of the island? Is it merely part of the riddle, perhaps a recipe, or a drug?

‘Sanctuary, mist’ presents an existing pond landscape on Vallisaari Island; an uncanny misty substance may appear on the surface of the water in a seemingly natural landscape – on an island that has been shaped by multiple histories of intervention, contamination, use and misuse, but is now experiencing a period of recuperation.

Mist invites a variety of interpretations. It is a slowly amorphing sculptural element that we invite the audience to see as a suggestive narrative. Is the mist part of the landscape, a speculative phenomenon, or another story altogether? How did it emerge in the first place, how does it shape the view and the atmosphere? Do misty particles find their way inside our bodies? The underlying theme of ‘Sanctuary, mist’ refers to an ancient idea of recuperation – pharmakon. It is where nature becomes both a source of remedy and a potential poison, dating back to the early origins of medicine.

What happens
Why are you here
From blur to clarity
Resolution to safety
–
Children play
Eternal summer days
Explosive mysteries
Sediments of time
–
Infinite waters
Recursive islands
Sea of unseen seasons
The source of life
–
Mist on your palm
Dripping past to present
A pond within a cell
Inside your chest
–
Poison and cure
Breeding serpents
Vices and sweat
Meadow flowers
–
Breath of life
Peacefully
Waiting in eternity
To arrive

With this project, Huber and Saarikko have been invited to take part in exhibitions and artist residencies around the world. They began with performances, videos and publications titled Huskurer Remedies (2010-11) in Sweden, and continued with further versions in Aotearoa NZ, twice in Australia, Haiti, Germany, Latvia, USA and Finland.

Different iterations of the Remedies have been shown at venues including the Oberhausen Film Festival (2017) and the 1st Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art – RIBOCA (2018).

installation (mist, pond, water, landscape, text)

Remedies (Sasha Huber and Petri Saarikko)

Newly Formed

Yehwan Song is a South Korean web artist and designer who creates anti-friendly, non-user-centric, unconventional, and diverse independent websites through which she tries to flip the general understanding of web design and subvert user behaviours. Song aims to illuminate inequalities in the digital environment and reframe digital accessibility.

In collaboration with the Digital Visual Studies project at the University of Zurich, Song has created a website that combines the collection of Helsinki Art Museum HAM and multimodal machine learning technology.

In Newly Formed, users visit an online map of the city and can interact with the public art collection based on geolocations. Through the map, the user starts to see the city through the collection, jumping from one panorama to another through portals, from which they can explore new groupings based on metrics created by the machine. New entanglements emerge from the combined agencies of the model, the visitors, the collection, and the city.

In my practice I focus on the insecurity and discomfort elicited by the web – a negative aspect that tends to be hidden behind technological utopianism and immoderate expectations of comfort, speed, and ease of use. I reveal the discomfort experienced especially by users who are not considered to be part of the major user group. I believe that digital discomfort derives from a lack of consideration for diversity and the deprivation of care. 
Interactions with the internet differ significantly depending on the user’s social environment, political infrastructure, and linguistic background. This means that much of the internet remains censored. Accessible data is filtered, and net neutrality is easily infringed.

When these differences are ignored and we continue to chase the illusion of speed and connectivity, we encounter digital discomfort. I pursue meaningful interaction with the entire internet over a wide penetration rate, and diversity over consistency and efficiency.

Yehwan Song’s work has been shown in various exhibitions and events around the world. Her most recent shows include The 17th Istanbul Biennial (2022); Distant Gallery, online (2022); To you: move toward where you are, Arko Art Center, Seoul (2022); Data Jungwon, Kim Heesu Art Center Art Gallery, Seoul (2022); While I’m Standing Here, online/Foundry, Seoul (2021); Hybrid by Nature, online/Goethe-Institut (2021); Seoul Biennale of Architecure and Urbanism 2021; Venice Biennale Korean pavilion: Virtual School Tour, Seoul/Venice (2021); World On A Wire, online, Beijing, Moscow, Seoul Rhizome & Hyundai motor studio (2021).

Yehwan Song  
in collaboration with Digital Visual Studies

Digital Visual Studies (DVS) is a five-year cooperation project funded by the Max Planck Society and hosted by the University of Zurich from January 2020. The DVS team for Newly Formed includes Tristan Weddigen, Darío Negueruela del Castillo, Leonardo Impett, Iacopo Neri, Pepe Ballesteros, Valentine Bernasconi, Jason Armitage, and Ludovica Schaerf.

Comissioned by HAM/Helsinki Biennial 2023. Developed as a collaboration between artist Yehwan Song, Digital Visual Studies project and curator Joasia Krysa.

Yehwan Song

Adrián Villar Rojas is an Argentinian artist who conceives long-term projects that are produced collectively and collaboratively, assuming the form of large-scale, site-specific environments that are both imposing and fragile. His works leave a minimal imprint of their passage through the world thanks to their perishing materiality and parasitical integration. Within his research and worldbuilding, which mixes sculpture, drawing, video, literature and performative traces, Villar Rojas brings together the human and more-than-human realms while investigating the fragile and temporary nature of human civilization.

For Helsinki Biennial 2023, Villar Rojas created a site-specific sculptural work in dialogue with the environment and inhabitants of Vallisaari Island.  The work comprised a total of 15 sculptures. The work has its roots in Villar Rojas’s Brick Farm, a series of works inspired by the Argentinian hornero bird, which makes its nests from mud, straw and rubble, adapting them to human-built surroundings. In the new work, however, there is a shift from the organic, ephemeral sculptures inspired by the hornero to a more artificial, yet still more-than-human mode of materiality.

Using an amalgamation of software systems collectively described as the ‘Time Engine’, Villar Rojas generated a series of intensely detailed virtual worlds and placed sculptures within them.

Simulating various environmental and socio-political conditions across timespans ranging from hours to millennia, the Time Engine allows him to take his already experimental sculptural practice to a new level, creating works in places and times that surpass our tangible realities.

As the extreme conditions of each world bore down on the sculptures, they became ever more complex and harrowed. Fires scorched them, altered gravity distorted them. Unrest toppled them, wars wounded them. Other life forms sheltered within or bloomed upon them. The artist modelled worlds, which in turn modelled the sculptures.

The effect of the environment and time on his work has always been an important part of Villar Rojas’s practice. From the beginning of his career, he has been interested in the interaction between inorganic and organic or human-made and so-called natural materials. He exposes his art to the elements, unconcerned about how it is influenced by the environment – for him, destruction and decay are brought about by the inevitable entropy of being in the world.

Solo exhibitions include The End of Imagination, The Tank, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2022); El fin de la imaginación, The Bass, Miami (2022); La fin de l’imagination, Marian Goodman Galerie, Paris (2020); Poems for Earthlings, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam (2019); Sometimes You Wonder, in an Interconnected Universe, Who is Dreaming Who?, Tank Shanghai, China (2019); The Theater of Disappearance, The Geffen Contemporary at Moca, Los Angeles (2017); NEON at Athens National Observatory, Greece (2017); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2017).

Participation in international group exhibitions includes Portals, Hellenic Parliament + NEON, Athens (2021); Bruges Triennial, Belgium (2021); 12th and 13th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2020 and 2018); 2nd Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2020); Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2020); Layers of Time, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019); 1st Riga Biennial, Latvia (2018); 14th and 12th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2015 and 2012); 12th Havana Biennial, Cuba (2015); 12th Sharjah Biennial, Kalba, United Arab Emirates (2015); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel and Kabul (2012); The New Museum Triennial, New York (2012); and 54th Venice Biennale, Argentina’s National Pavilion, Italy (2011).

Villar Rojas has been the recipient of numerous prizes such as Konex Award (2012 and 2022); the Sharjah Biennial Prize (2015); the Prix Canson, Paris (2015); the Zurich Art Prize at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv (2013); the 9th Benesse Prize in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); the Nuevo Banco de Santa Fe Scholarship for Young Artists (2006); and the First Prize National Art Biennial of Bahía Blanca, Argentina (2005). In 2020 he was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize. His 2013 film, Lo que el fuego me trajo, screened at the Locarno International Film Festival 2013. His 2017 film trilogy, The Theater of Disappearance, screened at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival 2017.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017); Rinascimento, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino (2015); Fantasma, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2015); Two Suns, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2015); The Evolution of God, The High Line, New York (2014); Los teatros de Saturno, Kurimanzutto, Mexico City (2014); Today We Reboot the Planet, Serpentine Galleries, London (2013); and La inocencia de los animales, Moma Ps1, New York (2013).

live simulations of active digital ecologies, organic and inorganic materials

Production design and coordination: Cindi Beltramone, Malena Cocca, Noelia Ferretti, Luis Villar Rojas

Digital modelling and visualization: Francisco Castells, Matheus Frey, Guillermina Sgro

Communication, editorial and press: Malena Cocca, Noelia Ferretti

Studio management: Cindi Beltramone, Javier Manoli

Construction and installation: Juan Manuel Arranz, Alejandro Cinalli, Maikel Plasencia González, Jonatan Suárez

Sculpture making and modelling: Juan Barbieratti, Georgina Bürgi, Matías Chianea, Aurelio Cossar, Javier Gamboa, Blu Navarro, Juan Pablo Wingeyer

Adrián Villar Rojas

Bita Razavi is a multidisciplinary artist known for her autofictional practice centered around observations of everyday situations. While working as a cleaner in Helsinki, Razavi photographed design objects in Finnish homes, observing them as a manifestation of national identity. She married her schoolmate in her studio at the Academy of Fine Arts to address Finnish immigration policies and spent four years renovating two houses in Estonia to study the Soviet renovation practices through years of changing economic and political situations.

Bita Razavi’s work at Helsinki Biennial 2023 consists of a kinetic sculpture Kratt and a sculptural spatial intervention Elevated Platform. The kinetic sculpture evokes a ‘Kratt’, a mythological creature from Estonian folklore.

Made up of household objects, it came to life once three drops of blood had been sacrificed to the devil and performed any task, including wrongdoings, for its owner.

To access Kratt, the spectator has two options, to walk up the Elevated Platform or to remain on the floor level. To reach the top of the platform, one must walk on a floor of fake marble supported by a ramp covered by raw teak veneer. While people on the platform can enjoy Emilie Saal’s botanical drawings printed on the upper belt of the sculpture, the visitors below see the lower belts and the images of destroyed landscapes documenting conditions of colonial extraction of labour and soil in Dutch East Indies.

These images were removed from the exhibition of the Estonian Pavilion, at the 59th Venice Biennale where the work was previously shown, and the finalized sculpture is being exhibited for the first time at the Helsinki Biennial 2023.

Coming from a country where resistance is an inevitable aspect of life, I’ve long been fascinated by creative strategies of resistance. While researching the life story of artist Emilie Rosalie Saal, I came across several resistance movements against the exploitation of local resources in Indonesia. Among them was Samin Movement and weaving protests. Soon it became apparent to me that not telling these stories or not dealing with the dark colonial context of Saal’s success story would be historical erasure. My work deals with erasure, the complex relation between the colonized and the colonizer, and incomplete narratives – whose story is told and who is erased.

Konstnärer