- Candidates -
2025
The candidates for Ars Fennica 2025 have been selected by an award panel. The award is presented to a visual artist in recognition of distinctive artistic work of high merit and includes a monetary prize of 50,000 €. The award winner will be chosen by an international art expert appointed by the panel. The winner 2025 will be selected by Mami Kataoka, director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.
Award Panel
- Leena Niemistö, chairperson
- Leevi Haapala, dean, Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki
- Arja Miller, director, HAM Helsinki Art Museum
- Eija-Liisa Ahtila, visual artist
Exhibition
A joint exhibition showcasing the nominees’ works will be on display at HAM Helsinki Art Museum from October 24, 2025, to March 15, 2026. The winner will be announced in the spring of 2026. The public can also vote for their favorite at the exhibition.
Introducing
Artists
ARS FENNICA Candidates 2025
Ragna Bley
Norway
Ragna Bley’s large paintings are characterised by organic and fluid forms that leave room for chance and unpredictability. Her art oscillates between the representational and the enigmatic. Distinctly experimental, her work also includes sculptures and performances wherein language and text are important components. Spatiality plays an important role in experiencing Bley’s work. For instance, a series of paintings might be hung on wires, floating back-to-back across the room, creating unique conditions for viewing and experiencing.
Roland Persson
Sweden
Nature is depicted in Roland Persson’s painterly silicone sculptures and large-scale installations with an ambiguous tension, balancing destruction and creation. His representations of reality often blend in surreal, dreamlike elements, with plants and animals appearing distorted and mistreated by humanity. Persson’s work features objects or fragments of nature to which he has a special connection or with which he grew up. The subject can also be stories or fantasies that are loaded with something that concerns him personally.
Jani Ruscica
FINLAND
Jani Ruscica works across mediums of moving and printed image, sculpture and performance. Central to the artist’s practice is the slippage and simultaneity of meaning animated by forms that move, stretch, shape-shift, and exceed the borders of time, space, and bodies. Working with fragmentary signs or images we think we already know, Ruscica deploys the pseudo-familiar to undermine immediate legibility in favour of precarious, improvisational processes.
Hanna Vihriälä
Finland
The sense of material is the driving force in the art works by sculptor Hanna Vihriälä. She uses materials otherwise rarely seen in art, such as candy, gravel, and acrylic beads, which she strings together by hand on steel wires to create large, suspended, airy works. These pieces require meticulous craftsmanship, often comprising up to 350,000 acrylic beads that form a rigorous yet vibrant surface. Her works exhibit a tension between different contrasts like durability and fragility, or hard and soft.
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