SHAPE Helsinki Art Map, Helsinki (2025)

23/01/2025

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include four exhibitions:

📅 Everlasting Soup at is co-curated, co-hosted, and co-cooked by Farbod Fakharzadeh and Katie Lenanton, with artist collaborators Alejandra Alarcón, Bebetton (Eeva Rönkä & Jani A Purhonen), Michaela Casková, and Gladys Camilo. Feasting and togetherness have long been important within the cultural field. For centuries, the core elements of the salon—hospitality, artworks, and (intellectual) discourse—have been remixed and enacted according to the needs of changing public spheres, and those who inhabit them.

📅 Miina Aho’s works in the exhibition at are snapshots of the movement of a mass of lines —fragments of its stretching and swelling essence. In these works, the line struggles free only to be caught again, captured as glimpses of the various stages of its meandering choreography.

📅 Birth of a Gr***de at responds to the multi species colonial violence by drawing connections between the raw materials and their applications in creating the by-products that are eternally constructing and destructing, building up while simultaneously breaking down. The film playing on a loop performs the alternating role of grieving, anticipating and raging. It exists within these contradictions only to be further exaggerated through the performance of many multiplicities within the work.

📅 Eeva-Riitta Eerola’s and Jenni Toikka’s exhibition at consists of the film work W Is for Waves and the paintings that appear in it. W Is for Waves examines the artistic process, polyphony – or collective mind – and the intertwining of different art forms by taking as a starting point sisters, author Virginia Woolf and painter Vanessa Bell.

06/01/2025

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week's highlights include four exhibitions:

📅 announces WHILE I CAST A SHADOW ALREADY CAST, TIME LEAKS STEADILY OUT OF MY PALM with works by Sara Blosseville, Pamela Brandt, Ida Koitila, Aurora Reinhard, Anssi Taulu, Man Yau and commissioned poem by Laura Cemin. The exhibition is open on Sundays 14:00-16:00 and by appointment between 10.1.-23.2.2025

📅 is pleased to open its 2025 exhibition programme with Ulla Jokisalo’s Wordplay. Jokisalo’s art is rooted in language and narrative. Her works combine the techniques of handcrafting, photography and cut-out with philosophical and conceptual reflections on the nature of childhood and memory.

📅 Kim Somervuori’s third exhibition at consists of paintings on canvas of various sizes and a series of smaller works combining painting and collage techniques. Somervuori paints in a liberated way, with surfaces that are layered and breathable. The exhibition, called sketchbook, not only lets the viewer get close to the painting but also to the starting points of Somervuori’s visual thinking.

📅 Michal Czinege’s Garden of Death is a site-specific installation at . It includes painting with birch tree ash, earth pigment and cellulose on canvas, programmed LED light and sound elements. The exhibition is a part of the Lux Helsinki light festival.

30/12/2024

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include four exhibitions:

📅 The exhibition at comprises of oil paintings on jute that are interpretations of images that I received through a phone correspondence in the fall of 2023. The photographs were sent to me from a tree nursery in the outskirts of Warsaw, where my penpal worked as a gardener. The nursery is a familiar place to me, but working with the location from afar has skewed my perception of its scale and reality.

📅 The infinite expanse of space and the mystery of human existence on our planet have intrigued artists throughout the ages. This exhibition at invites visitors to explore humanity’s relationship with the environment, other species, and technology. What is our role and future in the universe? The exhibition features works by 22 artists or artist groups, including paintings, photographs, collages, assemblages, prints, videos, installations, and a robot.

📅 major exhibition takes an in-depth look at Tove Jansson’s public paintings, through which she shared joy, beauty and windows into magical worlds of storytelling. Filling half of HAM’s exhibition space on two floors, it presents over 180 artworks and other exhibits, along with a notable collection of previously unexhibited sketches. The show marks the first occasion that Tove Jansson’s (1914-2001) public paintings are featured collectively in one exhibition.

📅 Lukas Malte Hoffmann show at is now on until October 2025. Lukas Malte Hoffmann is an artist based in Helsinki working with sculpture and installation. Malte Hoffmann will make a changing exhibition to Alkovi utilising the space for a year.

23/12/2024

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include four exhibitions:

📅 In her exhibition at gallery, artist Taru Happonen explores a complex, ever-changing world from both a cosmic and microscopic perspective, blending sci-fi and real-world elements. Blending sci-fi and real-world elements, she combines the peeled skins of creatures with recurring motifs such as eye shapes, plant cells and circuitry. Organic and synthetic elements are inextricably intertwined in both the material presence and content of Happonen’s art.

📅 Takotsubo at was inspired by an article about broken heart syndrome. It described how, in 2004, Japanese doctors reported that individuals visiting clinics after an earthquake had symptoms similar to those experienced during a heart attack. The pain caused by takotsubo cardiomyopathy during and after a major emotional shock resembles a heart attack.

📅 In the wintertime exhibition at , wood and ceramics complement each other. The pitch black and glossy white wooden surfaces and the tones of red clay brick alongside porcelain are windows to other worlds – they bring play, warmth and comfort to the middle of this season. In their work, Niidome and Lautenbacher move freely in the field of design, art and handicrafts.

📅 At the heart of my work at is a longing for silence and questions about emptiness. I balance between silence and noise, searching for a space where nothing happens. I build a minimally expressive image surface layer by layer, loop by loop. Knitwear is used to being seen as a protection for the skin. It resembles paper and plays with the idea of painting: what it is and what it could be.

20/12/2024

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include four exhibitions:

📅 Veikko Björk’s small wood sculptures at are a kind of fragments of life, which pop up the sedimentary layers of memory when I sit on the wood. I remembered the buses, house structures and roads I had carved as a child, a whole miniature village where my brother and I could completely immerse ourselves in the magic of play.

📅 The exhibition The Tide of Forgetting and Remembering at , curated by Athanasía Aarniosuo, brings together five artists: Paola Fernanda Guzmán Figueroa, Maisa Majakka, Hannele Richert, Katie Shannon, and Virpi Stjerna. During the process of preparing the exhibition, the group met several times; they drank coffee, told each other stories, remembered what parties felt like in one’s youth, realised they had more in common than they originally knew, laughed a lot, and cried, too.

📅 MELTS exhibition takes place in the terrain of grief on the trail of snow. When the world is no longer what it has been. In the works, I deal with grief, crying and winter from the perspective of environmental grief. The artist is building a dialogue between the inanimate and the living, the universal and the individual, the whole and the broken.

📅 A three day exhibition at that brings together collaborative work by Aaro Murphy & Livia Schweizer, developed over the past year. The installation combines video and text based work by Aaro Murphy, while a flute composition by Livia Schweizer accompanies the video as a sound score. Exploring architectural air networks in cities the installation hopes to connect questions around the body, climate, urban memory, through video, text and sound.

10/12/2024

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include four events:

📍Welcome to celebrate the 10th anniversary of and the release of Mad House Publication Volume 5 on Friday, December 13. No advance registration required; you can participate in the entire program or just part of it. Find program, schedule & more details:

📍 Youth Advisory Board welcomes you to a screening of short films that explore relations to home and the land while experiencing migration. The shorts are by young filmmakers based in Finland and Sweden and have been selected in collaboration with Noncitizen, a collective exploring border politics, moving images, and art. The event is produced in collaboration with

📍Join us to celebrate 10 years of Rab-Rab Press, an independent publishing platform that redefines the relationship between experimental art, radical politics, and critical inquiry. Over three days, the Museum of Impossible Forms is proud to present a dedicated program featuring an exhibition, a book launch, talks, music, and a sale of books and posters. Find program & schedule:

📅 The gallery tour will start on 15th December at 13:30 from MUU Helsinki nykytaidekeskus (Tallberginkatu 1 C, Cable Factory). Other participating galleries are Forum Box, Galleria Topelius and Galleria Halmetoja. The tour lasts 1,5–2 hours and is guided by artist Jane Hughes. The tour will be in English. Participating is free of charge, welcome!

03/12/2024

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include two events and two exhibitions:

📅 Lower level hidden rooms is a duo exhibition by Evita Vasiljeva and Sauli Sirviö at . Sauli Sirviö’s publication, Archiving ‘en plein air’, has been released at the exhibition opening, published by Utu Press. Exhibition is supported by Kone Foundation, Oskar Öflunds Stiftelse, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Nordic Culture Point, VKKF, and the Embassy of Latvia to Finland.

📍 welcomes you to join a dialogue between visiting curator Madeleine Collie and Bioart Society’s artistic director Yvonne Billimore on Tuesday, 3 December between 6–7.30 pm Frame’s office (Töölönkatu 11 A, Helsinki). The curators will discuss their collaboration on the project Follow the Plants, developed in partnership with . The event is open for all to participate.

📍.helsinki is pleased to launch the inaugural edition of the Minna Tarkka Lectures, a new annual initiative focused on discussing and debating the potential of art, media, and technology to participate in and shape current and future democratic societies. For the first edition, M-Cult has invited artists Tellervo Kalleinen & Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, artist Trevor Paglen and artists Julia Nisperos and Wax Roldan from Green Papaya Art Projects to deliver lectures at the @ HAM Helsinki Art Museum. In addition, speakers will lead workshops hosted by M-Cult and organised in collaboration with and the .

📅 French artist Pauline Curnier Jardin’s exhibition transforms exhibition space into a grotesque theme park. The film works that await us in its depths offer glimpses into the fate of women and others marginalised in various ways in “entertainment” and as objects of power. The films in the exhibition deal with gender norms, power and violence, for example, through historical events, the carnality associated with the Catholic Faith, and the experience industry with its emphasis on romance.

25/11/2024

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include one event and three exhibitions:

📅 On the German-Polish border, on the Słubice side, stands what is likely the only Wikipedia monument in the world. Wikipedia represents an international, open method of producing knowledge. But why haven’t more monuments been created or dedicated to it? For the exhibition “A Competition for the World’s Second Wikipedia Monument” at have been invited proposals from nine different artists. In addition to this, it is possible to participate in the exhibition with your own proposal in free form but limited to A3 size.

📍Discussion event on Freedom of Expression Amidst the Israel-Palestine Conflict happens on Wednesday 27 November at 5-8pm at . In a time when public discourse is shaped by both polarization and false equivalencies, artists who express support for Palestine are increasingly facing censorship; exhibitions and talks have been cancelled, and artworks removed from displays or collections. This suppression raises questions about freedom of expression and the role of art in political discourse.

📅 closing exhibition of the autumn season showcases four artists: Saija Kivikangas, Eeva Lietonen, Jaakko Pietiläinen and Suvi Sysi. Each artist works independently, yet together the works resonate with each other through hunches, porous thresholds, and flowing states of liminality. With material-based practices, unspoken feelings are invited and made replete. Time and materials circulate, compressing layer upon layer during the darkest hour of the year, suggesting new beginnings.

📅 Suvi Järvelin’s exhibition at opens the creative design process from sketches to results. In the Tomato exhibition, an interesting design is created from a familiar and simple thing – tomato. The starting point of the exhibition is to explore how a visual concept can be implemented based on a strict delineation, and whether strict framing can even free up creative work.

21/11/2024

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include four events:

📍The 21st international theater festival Baltic Circle will take place in Helsinki from 22 to 30 November 2024. This year’s program will include domestic premieres, workshops, discussions, an audio work and a seminar on future power. The 2024 festival program focuses on listening and watching the realities that are happening side by side. Find full program, tickets & more:

📍 annual Live Art event, will take place at Yö Galleria this year. On November 22, Kattila #2, a hot pot for performance experiments, will give the space for artists to show and test performances, provocations, movements, actions, sounds, gestures, live images, speeches, or public statements. On November 24, Home Cooking will serve a blend of Live Art performances, stand up comedy, and a video installation, featuring Sofia Stupenkova, Rute Morais Peixoto, Kihwa-Endale, Sophia Mitiku, Timjune Tianjun Li, Salla Hakkola, Otter Godot, Natalia Kozel-Kalliomäki, and Willem Wilhelmus.

📍Songscapes at encompasses moments of togetherness and inspiration, through sharing music by Loïca, Manu Rosales, and Devina Boughton. They bring original song compositions, showing the multiplicity of sound landscapes that a song can have. Doors open at 18:30 and at 19:30 each musician will perform their set. The event is free, with a suggested contribution “give what you can” to support the artists.

📍The Christmas Sales, where hundreds of Aalto ARTS students come to sell their art and designs, will be held in the Väre building at Aalto University from 22 November until 24 November! Welcome to the biggest and longest running annual sale of student artworks in Finland! 22-24 November, Fri 17:00-20:00, Sat & Sun 11:00-18:0 0 at Otaniementie 14, 02150 Espoo, Aalto University, Väre building

14/11/2024

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include four exhibitions:

📅 Matti Aikio’s first solo exhibition in Helsinki at . When the world is at war, climate change and species extinction are accelerating, racism against the Sámi is on the rise, and darkness is approaching, sometimes you just want to dream by the fireshore (while living in a goahti). In such moments, the artist may simply want to create something beautiful, warm, soft, and comforting – something you want to linger by, something that warms you.

📅 Erich Berger’s exhibition Spectral Landscapes at presents three distinct installations: Spectral Landscapes, Landscape Machines, and Anthropomemes. Each installation integrates multiple elements—data-driven sound, video, and digitally augmented images—that together form a series of observations and observatories that explore radioactivity within the landscape.

📅 The 25th text of the is now out. It is written by Kaj Kalin and designed by Nina Andelin. Kaj Kalin is a writer. He has nothing to say about himself. The window text is dedicated to Pentti Linkola (1932–2020). Nina Andelin (former. Grönlund) is a visual communication designer who has worked as a graphic designer, illustrator and art director.

📅 Laura Ukkonen’s exhibition at includes woodcuts, ink and pastel drawings and collages. The works feature people in their home interiors and drawings of plants. Sometimes the human being adapts to the composition on the terms of the plants, or disappears altogether.

05/11/2024

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include three events and one exhibition:

📍 We warmly invite you to discover this year’s edition! Moving in November is a contemporary dance festival organised yearly in the Helsinki area. The festival is an invitation to come together. To experience artistic works from the local scene and abroad. Artists voicing their critical thinking, their visions, their experiences, their dreams, opening small windows to the world we are living in. Find full program & more at lmfestivaali

📍 Welcome to info session about the effects of the current political changes on the international community in Finland. We have invited specialists from education, culture politics, law and multicultural art & curation to share their insights and expertise with us. There will also be time to discuss and reflect on your own situation. This event follows up The Leap and Think Africa’s Info session – the impact of the Finnish government policy changes on the African diaspora.

📍This is THE book launch for all you millennial Finland based art lovers & haters: Hereillä, m***a mihin hintaan – Nykytaiteen millenniaaliantologia. Come celebrate, browse, and buy the book published by at on Thursday the 7th starting at 18:00!

📅 In November, will transform into a miniature golf course lined with green. We warmly welcome you for a round – but don’t be surprised if a cat is roaming around your feet! The surprising and experience-driven Pancor Poetics is an interactive piece created with dance artists, where dancers wander around the miniature golf course embodying the essence of a cat – rather than merely performing it. The piece is part of the joint programme between Kunsthalle Helsinki and the Moving in November festival.

29/10/2024

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include three events and one exhibition:

📍Limbo is a curated series of events showcased at The Museum of Technology over the weekend of November 1st, 2nd and 3rd, as part of Festival 2024. The two-day program, situated at the intersection of live music, cinema, and performance, features artist-led workshops, performances, and screenings where live soundscapes merge with silent classic films.

📅 Endless Drop at .uniarts is a group exhibition with eight artists looking into the theme of fear and questions around it. In which situations does fear occur and show itself, even if it seems contradicting? Does fear form into a physical being? Or an image? What is fear actually? Liquid fear expresses the undefined and ambivalent motions of contemporary times, which cannot be perceived as one simple truth. Endless Drop draws toward the individual and collective experiences of fear which travel with us in our lives.

📍On the somber anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, observed on November 2nd, and in an effort to amplify Palestinian voices, is screening “Maloul Celebrates its Destruction” by Michel Khleifi, “Fix Me” by Raed Andoni, and “Levitations” by Dalia Alkury at the Museum of Impossible Forms. These Palestinian-made films envision a counter future that imaginatively attend to the psychic scars left by displacement, military occupation, and war.

📍Welcome to the Autumn edition of the Open Studios! The event offers the unique opportunity to meet up and engage into conversations with the resident artists and curators, get to know more about their practice, and view the work that they are currently developing as part of their residency. This season’s event takes place in the second half of the Autumn residency season that runs until the third week of November, and allows a glimpse into various stages of artistic work, research and experimentation.

21/10/2024

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include two events and two exhibitions:

📅 ‘Social Form’ at unites four distinguished artists from Finland who will all show one lens-based work each, either films or photographs. The title and the works in the exhibition allude to two things: the continued relevance of socially engaged art as an aesthetic practice, and the role of personhood in relations between humans, within any society and between different societies. Social form is an experimental notion. It wants us to open our eyes to all the things that may happen in such meetings.

📍 On 23rd October, 4-6pm and the Saastamoinen Foundation are delighted to present The Octopus: On Diversities, Art Production, Educational Models, and Curatorial Trajectories publication. This book is the accumulation of the Octopus Programme (2019-2022), which was designed as a guided research-based educational programme that encouraged artistic research and production-based collaborations in different geographical regions.

📍 Welcome to see Välke Ruusunen’s solo performance Deep Tinge. The performance is a mixing butoh, dance and poetry In the poem of Stephen Crane, In The Desert, they find a be***al creature eating pleasureful their own bitter heart in the middle of a desert. I instead found a wheelbarrow of freshly cut roses in front of the botanical garden, beautifully blooming, same time dying. All this with researching on softness. Performances in , Pääskylänrinne 10, 23.10. at 19:00 & 24.10. at 19:00

📅 In this exhibition at two artists, Sasha Huber and Petri Saarikko, come together to explore themes of otherness and connection. Sasha Huber’s works focus on stitching out personal and ancestral memories, while Petri Saarikko explores interaction, communication, and the meanings of community. Both artists highlight the multidimensionality of otherness: how opposites can complement each other – like night and day.

15/10/2024

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include four exhibitions:

📅 Reima Nevalainen’s recent paintings at evince his deepening interest in landscape painting alongside his existing fascination with figure studies. His nature imagery functions both as the backdrop for his figures as well as a metaphor for the human body, which consists of water and is hence dependent upon it. In his paintings, the human body is inseparable from nature and its water cycles, proving to flourish better in damp caves than under the scorching sun.

📅 O O is a combination of letters, two marks drawn on paper that stare at the viewer like bewildered cartoon eyes. They repeat the shape of a hat placed on the gallery floor and the yellow centre of a daisy. While preparing works for , Mikko Kuorinki photographed daisies, melted beeswax, collected round objects, and bowed thin wood into circles. He studied the history of Shaker furniture, listened to artist lectures, watched YouTube tutorials, and waxed pink awnings. The collection of works in the gallery combines processed and unprocessed objects and photographs.

📅 The joint exhibition at Garden of Heavenly Delights by illustrator Sanna Suova and designer-ceramic artist Tero Kuitunen explores the significance of working with hands as a counterbalance to the hectic world. The exhibition features Kuitunen’s ceramics and Suova’s small publication, Garden of Delights, printed using risograph and screen printing techniques.

📅 Time, Zone and Place is an exhibition by the working group Naomi Holopainen, Wanda Holopainen and Yilin Ma at . Through time, place and space, the working group reflects on the interconnectedness of the personal and the collective. The exhibition builds on layers of memories, emotions and experiences, inviting us to pause and reflect on how objects, images and movement can act as archives - and how they affect us on an emotional level.

09/10/2024

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include two events and two exhibitions:

📅 is proud to present the first major solo exhibition of Palestinian-Danish video and installation artist Larissa Sansour (b. 1973) in Finland. Past, present and possible futures meet in a darkly expressive exhibition in which political but universally human topical issues interweave with imagined realities using the narrative methods of science fiction, documentary and opera.

📍The echo exhibit is a one-to-one conversation between a poet Asiya Wadud and a participant. It will take place alongside Howard Smith’s environmental artwork “Liikkumattomia tanssijoita” in Arabia, Helsinki. After each conversation, Wadud will write a poem drawn from the encounter. These poems will be published in Publication Vol. 5 in December 2024.

📅 Text 24 of is now out. It is written by Pauliina Haasjoki and designed by Multipöly. The text is on view from 3 to 30 October, 2024. Pauliina Haasjoki writes poetry along with other texts. She also enjoys thinking with movement and drawing. She seeks to express connections. The window text is a series of certain textual movements which reach for the unravelling of a closed system. Sometimes that needs less and other times more work through perception and sensation.

📍 During this iteration of Dialogues, Erich Berger invites participants for a dialogue about his ongoing engagement with deep time, deep futures and the nuclear contemporary through his art and research practice. The backdrop for this conversation, serving cues and suggestions, is provided by a test-setup of his upcoming solo exhibition Spectral Landscapes at Muu Contemporary Art Centre later this year in November.

30/09/2024

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include one event and three exhibitions:

📅 Intertwined world exhibition at takes us on an exploration of nature and ourselves. The artworks in the exhibition explore nature through immersion, wonder, disappearance and adventure. Invited artist Rebecca Louise Law and the artist duo IC-98 and Vantaa Art Museum’s collection artists Satu Autero, Emma Helle and Kari Vehosalo bring through their artworks different perspectives to the theme of the exhibition. The exhibition is part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the City of Vantaa.

📍 The Asbestos Ars Week festival at is focused on experimental music and performance. This year, the festival will be held over two days, with the theme of experimental music and performance! More details and schedule:

📅 What does it mean to be a “self” in the 21st century? This is the question at the core of British-Japanese artist Simon Fujiwara’s work. His exhibition It’s a Small World at features key works from the full span of the artist’s career.

📅 People are the main focus of Ville Löppönen’s exhibition The Head Speaks at . Charcoal drawings highlight the impressive and nuanced faces in a way that recalls the drawings of Renaissance and Baroque masters. In small oil paintings, the boundaries of humanity dissolve into the world around us. The psychological interpretation of Löppönen’s works is easy to transport to a narrative level, while making it human and relatable.

SHAPE Helsinki Art Map