The Ars Fennica 2025 Prize has been awarded to the Swedish visual artist Roland Persson. The winner was chosen by the internationally recognized curator and museum director Mami Kataoka, who is the director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and also serves as an expert for the Ars Fennica 2025 Prize.
Kataoka explains her choice as follows:
The Ars Fennica 2025 exhibition reveals how each artist grasps the meaning of life and existence in the Nordic region—the helplessness and powerlessness within an uncertain world—and how they encapsulate and express these delicate emotions within their artworks. In particular, the ongoing war in neighboring countries separated by a long border is imagined to awaken, whether consciously or unconsciously, a sense of tension and defensive instinct.
Within this context, I would like to award Ars Fennica 2025 to Roland Persson. He manipulates the material of silicone, summoning back into the real world what has been transformed from reality into the unconscious or dream world. Or he projects the world seen from the perspective of plants and animals onto human society.
There, while politically confronting the serious and extremely entangled complex world situation, Persson transforms them through his unique poetry into objects that contain ambiguity.
Silicone, a material that faithfully reproduces reality, becomes charged with multi-layered meanings during the process of transformation and reconstruction. They compel us to ask whether the horse lying on the piano seeks in music something lost through battle, or whether the music is also dead. The horse’s head supported by timber also suggests the ambiguous status of its life. The Victoria amazonica, with its complex structure and sense of scale, covers furniture as if nature were eroding human living space, and here too the furniture barely stands, braced with wood. We can see that opposing emotions such as loss and desire, aggression and receptivity, maintain a delicate equilibrium, and we could start imagining that the antagonism and coexistence, and the tension born from contradiction seen in Persson’s practice symbolize today’s world.
In Ragna Bley’s paintings, the temporal element of melting snow is fused with paint, distancing herself from perfect human control over the canvas. The grand providence of nature is projected into her image-making process, evoking a sense of the ephemerality and temporality of existence. In Jani Ruscica’s exhibition, dynamic and fluid wall drawings and video works resonated with each other, revealing the multilayered nature, plurality, and ambiguity of this world. The horizontally installed screens, in particular, avoided a confrontational structure with the viewer, creating a fluid relationship. Hanna Vihriälä’s works—such as massive flowers composed of vast quantities of candies and a car form constructed from accumulated funeral ribbons—suggest a stance of barely maintaining monumental strength through aggregations of fragile, small materials that evoke femininity. A compelling thread runs through all these works in their expression of unstable, uncertain presence rather than solid, confident existence.
Mami Kataoka
Museum Director, Mori Art Museum