Anna Estarriola is a Catalan-born artist based in Helsinki whose multidisciplinary practice combines sculptural installations with moving image, sound, and technology through a performative approach. Working across these media, she frequently integrates the embodiment as both subject and object, using it as a lens through which to examine perception, communication, and the construction of reality. Her work draws influence from different forms of science, epistemologies and systems of belief, often through carefully staged circumstances.
Artwork
Piles of Things, 2025, installation, 10-channel sound, stone casting powder, plaster, metal, wood, textiles, repurposed objects, variable dimensions. In the collection of Finnish National Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma. Photo: Jussi Tiainen.
Emerging Thoughts, 2015, installation, multi-channel sound, aluminum, paper, wool, hemp, synthetic fiber, 1.96 × 2.25 × 1.5 m. In the collection of Finnish National Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma. Photo: Jussi Tiainen.
Moment, 2023, installation, 4-channel sound, cast stone powder, textiles, synthetic fibres, metal, wood, artificial grass, light, 310 × 210 × 400 cm. In the collection of Serlachius Art Collection. Photo: Sampo Linkoneva.
My Last Choreography, 2016, installation, silicone, mechanics, electronics, wood, 100 × 100 × 2 cm (current pedestal: 180 × 180 × 19 cm). In the collection of EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Ari Karttunen.
Resonance, 2019, installation, 3-channel sound, glass fibre, plaster, textiles, 125 × 282 × 125 cm. In the collection of Helsinki Art Museum. Photo: Jussi Tiainen.
Presentation
Anna Estarriola is a Catalan-born artist based in Helsinki whose multidisciplinary practice combines sculptural installations with moving image, sound, and technology through a performative approach. Working across these media, she frequently integrates the embodiment as both subject and object, using it as a lens through which to examine perception, communication, and the construction of reality. Her work draws influence from different forms of science, epistemologies and systems of belief, often through carefully staged circumstances.
In Estarriola’s practice, the boundaries between the possible and the impossible become ambiguous. Her work unfolds as shifting environments where scales, perspectives and power structures are in contrast and coexistence. Layered narratives can emerge — like scenes from an ongoing, non-ending play. Her works reflect attempts at understanding and cooperation, while also embracing the uncertainty, miscommunication, and failure that are sometimes inseparable from them.
Her installations often combine recognisable elements and situations into constructed but unstable mechanisms of meaning, where definitions of truth can be questioned from multiple angles. Beneath this lies a persistent curiosity about life — and death — and about how individual and collective behaviours shape different nested and shared realities. Estarriola has also worked as a director, performer and video artist in dance, theatre and live performance projects.
Born in 1980 in Banyoles, Catalonia, Estarriola holds a BA from the University of Barcelona (2004) and an MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki (2009), and has also studied contemporary dance. Her work has been presented in Finland and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Amos Rex, the Serlachius Museums, Pori Art Museum and Galerie Anhava, among others. Her works have also been shown in venues such as Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Tallinn City Gallery, Max Estrella in Madrid and Borås Art Museum in Sweden. In 2015 she received the AVEK Award for media art, and in 2023 the William Thuring designated Prize. Her works are in major public and private collections such as the Finnish National Gallery, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Pori Art Museum, HAM Helsinki Art Museum and the Saastamoinen Foundation.
”I am interested in the instability of certainties and presences, in unknowns that recur and morph across time, and in the speculative staging of hypotheses about how things are, relate or could be.”
– Anna Estarriola