SHAPE Helsinki Art Map, Helsinki (2025)

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.

24/09/2024

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

This week’s highlights include four exhibitions:

📅 Passage exhibition at showcases paintings by the Swedish artist Ulla Wiggen (b. 1942) throughout her career spanning over six decades. Wiggen’s career is marked by distinct yet surprising transitions from one subject to another. Her works also feature various kinds of transitions and passages, where the viewer’s gaze focuses inward on the depicted subject and then back outward again. The exhibition’s name also refers to the painting, Passage, on display.

📅 Polina Choni’s exhibition at is inspired by the rituals and observations of everyday life. Her practice involves experimenting with natural materials, heating, mixing, and creating as a form of meditation and healing. Through these actions she fosters self-awareness and connection with nature, creating a new reality based on simple joys and repetitive acts of daily life. This process reflects a journey where ordinary actions become powerful acts of creation, reflection, and restoration.

📅 The BFA exhibition takes over the ground floor of the Mylly building from 13 September to 6 October. The BFA Exhibition consists of works by 24 students of the Academy of Fine Arts. The annual bachelors’ degree exhibition at .uniarts presents the work of students from all subject areas at the Academy of Fine Arts of Uniarts Helsinki: Painting, Printmaking, Sculpture and Time and Space Arts.

📅 The works in new exhibition began to take shape three years ago. The impulse to create this body of work arose from experiences of urban spaces that have left a lasting impression on me and their connections with ideas about the complex meaning of shared spaces. The title of Pirkko Rantatorikka’s exhibition reflects my collage-like process that draws on various documentary sources, with each work allowed to take its own individual shape.

16/09/2024

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 two exhibitions:

📍 Come and celebrate Maaleipä — a challenge that invited home bakers, bakeries, restaurants, schools, and communities in Finland to create bread recipes that combine the well-being of land, water and people’s guts. Commission 2024 Cooking Sections’ Maaleipä Challenge culminates in a celebratory event on Saturday 21 September, from 14:00 to 18:00 at the Teurastamo Kellohalli. In addition to the finalist breads that will be displayed and available to taste, expect a market featuring soil-nourishing products, a food security workshop, bread chants, music and other treats.

📍 Welcome to celebrate the 45th anniversary of , the sculptors’ own gallery, on 21 September at 12-16 (Eteläranta 12, Helsinki)! We will offer birthday treats to our customers and the day will include an inspiring discussion about sculpture art and collecting. In addition, gallery staff will be present in the Sculpture Shop to give you tips on both installing sculptures and finding different sculpture options to suit your wishes. Detailed program: @ sculptors

📍Welcome to the book launch of Bright Ecologies by Andrea Caretto and Raffaella Spagna. Andrea and Raffaella will join us at and be in conversation with Alessandra Pioselli, one of the book’s curators and editors. Bright Ecologies is the first overview of the artistic research of an Italian artistic duo focused on site specific art project with a sensible attitude to the landscape, in a full-bodied monograph that interweaves interpretive and documentary approaches, critical and theoretical reading with the regest and reconstruction of a broad itinerary.

📅 The Transformative Figure, Anna-Sofia Nylund’s three-channel video work premiering at , is a study of her own working methods and processes. She highlights her interest in observation, with the focus on the gaze. The film’s main character is an embodiment of the link between Nylund’s own observing gaze and reality.

10/09/2024

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:

📅 Päivi Takala‘s solo exhibition My Precious at opens the door into a quiet room filled with light-infused paintings and thinking in motion. With a critical yet gentle eye and soft brushstrokes, Takala observes and contemplates the human way of being with other living things. Her painting process for this show crystallised into the question: how can one portray both the human tendency to dominate and exploit natural beings, and the eternal longing to be touched by nature?

📍Performing on the edge of can and can’t. Part sculpture, installation, performance art; performing strange circuits, bad balancing and ungainly suspensions. Actions, objects, sweaty coppery prints. An accumulation of Detritus forming as the menopausal gym is activated. Kira O’Reilly (b. 1967) is an Irish artist based in Helsinki, her practice works with multiple media including performance art, installation, sculpture, biotechnical practices and writing with which to consider speculative reconfigurations around The Body. More information & tickets:

📅 Hanna Kanto’s first exhibition at continues on the path of the extensive solo show at the Rovaniemi Art Museum last autumn. Kanto depicts the relationship between man and nature on both a practical and complex level. The paintings, full of detail, have retained their aural quality, but they are not ethereal. Power and humour breathe alongside airy composition.

📍 is delighted to host Canadian Landscape Architect Dennis Alan Winters who will give a talk titled Meditations on The Spiritual Nature of Space. Dennis Alan Winters, a Buddhist and a designer of places of refuge for spiritual renewal, invites you to explore questions of space and spirituality. The lecture will be in English.

SHAPE Helsinki Art Map