SHAPE Helsinki Art Map, Helsinki (2024)

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.

03/09/2024

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

This week’s highlights include four exhibitions:

📅 Crockery refers to everyday ceramic tableware, rather than fine, expensive china. You’ll set the table with crockery when the occasion is too formal for paper plates but not fancy enough for porcelain. Fredrik brings viewers to a world of vibrant tranquillity at . Restful subjects are enlivened by vivid saturations and playful perspectives. Strong influences from fauvism and naivism entice Fredrik’s inner child. His process oriented approach involves experimentation with wax crayons, oil pastels, coloured pencils and acrylic paint.

📅 Manifesto24 at is a statement in favour of making things by hand and with analogue technology. The curator of the project, so_helsinki, has invited open-minded artists to interpret the theme either in print or sculpture to their studio. Unique works created with an old letterpress printing press or clay moulding, illustrating, through contemporary art, a tradition and the power of the word that is disappearing.

📅 In this exhibition at , Estonian artist Liis Koger has created and collected paintings that belong to the category of elements, in terms of Earth, Water, Wind and Fire. Liis Koger has developed philosophical principles into abstract paintings, considering that each of these elements has its own consciousness. Here, we can see a lot of different aspects about them, being largely channelled to elastic-plastic form within the handwriting of a painting.

📅 House parties are an invitation to get together, to celebrate, but they are also so much more. The exhibition at is born like a house party. New and exciting people have been invited, people you have long wanted to get to know but have not dared to without a good reason. Anna Jensen and Eliisa Suvanto have invited 14 artists to a group show at the SIC Gallery, which explores experimentation, the joy of being and working together, potential failures, and the exhibition as a monument and memorial to the process.

27/08/2024

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

This week’s highlights include four events:

📍Recent graduates welcome you to *intent*: practice, research and togetherness, a festival showcasing artistic and curatorial research through a multi-disciplinary programme under a pavilion tent on the green lawns of , Suomenlinna. The graduates’ work is curated through different formats of research and practice: a multi-disciplinary programme of talks, performances and film screenings, a showcase of printed matter, and an opening with live music and food.

📍“Holding Sand” is a dance and music performance at which researches touch, close contact, sand and glass. The artists look at the complexities of the relations between bodies by focusing their attention on hugging. Where are the edges of being in contact when hugging? And how many ways can the reading of embraces be complexified?

📍This reading group at is teamed with the launch of the Feral Labs Node Book #2: Feralities published by Bioart Society and Projekt Atol Institute in the context of the project Rewilding Cultures. As the second in the series of Feral Labs Node Books, this publication leans further to the feral to explore a multitude of approaches for embracing, occupying and thinking-with feralities. You can find the publication and more information at . The text will also be collectively read aloud at the start of the reading circle.

📍Brokeback Mountain with cultural ladies meets the dilemmas of a single mother when comic creators Anneli Furmark and Anna Härmälä discuss life crises at Library on the 29th of August. Anneli Furmark is one of Sweden’s most acclaimed comic creators. Anna Härmälä’s honest and funny, partly autobiographical comic strips quickly became an international internet phenomenon. The event is in Swedish.

20/08/2024

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:

📅 In Josefina Nelimarkka’s exhibition The Cloud of Un/knowing in , the cloud is a unique and fleeting moment, a continuous process guided by invisible streams of data. Real-time measurements from the Arctic regions, boreal forest, and a weather station on the roof of Amos Rex create a beautiful, subtle unity in which light, sound and digital water droplets are in constant motion.

📍 On August 20th, we welcome everyone to join us for a panel discussion exploring the challenges and opportunities faced by artists who have moved to Finland. The goal of the evening is also to provide valuable perspectives and practical advice for artists at various stages of their careers, from students to established professionals. The event is organized in collaboration between , and .

📍 The Other Side is excited to bring the first edition of ONE-DAY STAND event in collaboration with Artist Association to Myyrmäki Arts Night 2024, organized by Myyrmäki-Seura. To celebrate, is collaborating with Catalysti RY, a non-profit art association founded in 2013. For this event, The Other Side selected five proposals from an open call for Catalysti artists. The selected performances all incorporate participatory elements and engage socially with their audiences in public spaces. More information:

📍 Somistepelote is a fictional ghost walk through urban space and q***r history, an urban folk horror on the border between night and day. The work creates fictional urban enclaves through which it comments on violence and survival in urban space. The site-specific spoken word piece will be performed on the historic cruising cliffs of Central Park. More info & tickets:

12/08/2024

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:

📅 Jade Kallio: Konflikti exhibition is on show at until 1st of September. Alongside the release of bodily needs, the public toilet is also a recurring sordid discourse of power politics, which seeks to seep deep into the structures of the human psyche and maintain gender control over the individual. In the exhibition, the toilet is a stage for clashing needs and emotions. Jade Kallio is a Helsinki-based filmmaker and artist.

📍 ART SUMMIT 2024: Censorship in the Arts and Culture takes place on 15th of August! On the 15th of August, Globe Art Point, in close collaboration with Luckan Helsingfors, proudly presents the third edition of the annual art conference, GAP ART SUMMIT. This year, our conference explores the critical theme of “censorship.” The GAP ART SUMMIT 2024 serves as a platform for actionable discourse and inclusive workshops, both in-person and online, aimed at empowering artists, cultural workers and creative professionals in Finland. Find program and more information:

📅 Jacob Hashimoto’s latest works at are a unique blend of seemingly endless streams of images woven together in infinite tangles. His art is a rich tapestry of visual references, ranging from East Asian crafts to Atari circuit boards and from the complex shapes of leaves to the architecture of churches and mosques from the plague era. Hashimoto’s exhibition will present a selection of his smaller works alongside a vast installation. Filling up the entire gallery space, the installation forces the viewer to adapt to its imposing presence, requiring us to dodge and watch our step.

📅 autumn season opens with Peetu Liesinen’s exhibition Mood Operator. The exhibition presents a series of new paintings by Peetu Liesinen. The exhibition is Liesinen’s fourth solo show in Helsinki. Peetu Liesinen is a 2020 graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts with a Master of Arts degree.

05/08/2024

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

This week’s highlights include four exhibitions:

📅 is pleased to open its autumn season with an exhibition of Joel Slotte‘s gently ferocious paintings entitled A Kiss at the Cemetery Gate. Instead of shining heroes or powerful achievers, Slotte’s art focuses on complex underdogs, bruised thinkers and weary revellers. The works move effortlessly from lush gardens and shabby bike sheds to the murkiness of art history, the far edges of the universe, or the gates of a cemetery.

📅 new exhibition ‘Martti Aiha: A Culture’, curated by Kohta’s director Anders Kreuger in close collaboration with the artist Nina Roos, is a tribute to the artist Martti Aiha, who passed away in May last year. A prominent sculptor of his generation (born in 1952), he was, like Roos and her fellow painters Magdalena Åberg and Thomas Nyqvist, part of the core group that initiated Kunsthalle Kohta almost ten years ago.

📅 Zagros Manuchar’s exhibition, Medya, at , portrays a Kurdish woman of Syrian descent. The exhibition will also premiere a new experimental video work by Manuchar. This short film uses Medya’s real diaries, poems, and photographs to create a documentary narrative depicting her childhood games, memories, lost friends, schooling, and her neighbour’s children. It is a story of childhood, dreams, and aspirations amidst war and persecution.

📅 The illustrations by Hilla Semeri and ceramic sculptures by Sandra Prami stem from worlds filled with sticky chewing gum and sparkling, glittery plastic. “Viimeiset hitaat” (eng. Last dance) exhibition is on display until 11 August. The works of two creatives with a background in drawing celebrate girlishness and ornamental abundance. The styles and themes that once excited them as children on the sidelines of a soda disco now serve as a treasure trove for their creativity.

02/08/2024

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

This week’s highlights include four exhibitions:
 📅 Salarakas 4 year anniversary exhibition takes place at 01.08-15.08 with the walls covered in (mostly) pink paper. Join Salarakas fest to celebrate a 4-year anniversary! All events are free and open to the public.

📅 Sebastian Reis’ solo exhibition Pendulum at emerges from unexpected encounters and the unpredictability of our surroundings. Pendulum consists of free-standing two-dimensional photographic imagery that is transferred, cut out, overpainted and playfully attributed with three-dimensional structures.

📅 The Cryptid Hunter is Joey Holder’s first solo exhibition in Finland and part of her ‘Cryptid’ project. This exhibition at houses an eerie realm of AI-generated entities, often grotesque and distorted, populating an unseen graveyard on the internet. These digital apparitions resemble the legendary cryptids whose existence thrives on collective belief and the blurring of reality and fiction.

📅 Xiao Zhiyu uses the devices of Chinese traditional image-making to study the concept of landscape as a surface across objects. Layered Hills send off Glimmering Light is the starting line of a poem by Wen Tingyun (812–870), which casts a blurry glimpse into the interiors of a lady’s bedroom while she is dressing up. Taking up from the devices of Chinese traditional image-making, the concept of landscape is studied as a surface across objects at