Updates
The material I’ve used in this work in blood. Whenever I’ve been working on a monochromatic piece, I’ve taken it further by thinking how I could break the surface without making a composition or a picture.
We usually know the history from the winning side – the side told in history books. All the other parallel stories have been hidden. Those are the stories I am very interested in telling.
Since the mid-2000s I’ve sought to disengage moving image art from human-centredness.
ARS FENNICA Candidates for 2023
FINLAND
In Henni Alftan’s canvases, an entwined sense of the familiar and the uncanny keeps viewers actively looking and guessing. Everyday subjects such as domestic interiors, outdoor scenes, personal belongings and figures appear anything but commonplace through the artist’s precise manipulations of paint and composition.
FINLAND
Artist Tuomas A. Laitinen works with video installations, sound, glass as well as chemical and microbial processes. He is interested in ecological issues, the formation of proposals for knowledge, and porous systems.
SWEDEN
The installation artist Lap-See Lam (born 1970 Stockholm) explores the Cantonese diaspora in Sweden. She uses technology like 3D-scanning, Virtual Reality and animation to tackle different projects like cataloging the interiors of quickly disappearing Chinese restaurants in Stockholm.
LITHUANIA
The multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker, Emilija Škarnulytė has long been attuned to the stories that have shaped the transition from modern humanism to the post-human condition of perpetual crisis, critical hope, and a return to allegory as a means of comprehending the self and the Other within the maelstrom of radical change known as the twenty-first century.
NORWAY
Camille Norment is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist, composer, and performer whose art and performance works are exhibited and performed worldwide. Cultural psychoacoustics is both an aesthetic and conceptual framework for much of her practice.
An exhibition presenting the candidates will be held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma 8 September 2023 – 29 January 2024. The audience can also vote for their own favorite artist.
ARS FENNICA 2021
Visual artist and filmmaker Eija-Liisa Ahtila experiments with narration and form in her works that address the gendered, colonial and anthropocentric structures haunting the everyday and its representations.
From the archive
First ARS Fennica candidates 1991
ARS FENNICA -foundation
The Henna and Pertti Niemistö Art Foundation – ARS FENNICA sr was established in 1990 to promote the arts by opening up new channels for Finnish visual art internationally, by providing artists with inspiration in their creative work, and by encouraging interest in and respect for the visual arts among the general public.
In alternate years, the Foundation awards Finland’s most significant visual-art prize – 50,000 euros. The prize goes to an artist in recognition of individual artistic work of outstanding quality.