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.

Inspired by everyday observations, her subjects range from weeds and smoke breaks to Mercedes cars. Despite their everyday underpinnings, Vihriälä’s works are deeply personal, yet she succeeds in making them universally relatable, conveying emotions that many can identify with, such as the death of a parent, childhood memories, or greed. An ordinary object is magnified to an enormous size, taking on dreamlike, unreal features. Vihriälä’s visual language blends elements of graphic art, painting, and sculpture. Her works also engage multiple senses, such as a piece made of 200,000 pieces of sweet-scented candy forming a giant rose, expressing themes of desire, pleasure, and temptation.

Vihriälä is known for her numerous public works in schools and hospitals across Finland. Her work is highly site-specific, with dimensions and sometimes content and materials sourced from the installation locations. Vihriälä also uses bronze, cast iron, aluminium, and brass, such as when she created animal noses in alphabetical order on a primary school wall. She often engages with local residents, encouraging them to contribute materials to her creations, such as pink toys, knitting needles, plastic screw caps, mobile phone cases, straws, and balls, building from them a huge flying, youthful heart.

Hanna Vihriälä (b. 1974 in Oulainen, lives and works in Tampere, Finland) graduated from the sculpture department of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2003. She also holds a degree in sculpture from the Estonian Academy of Arts. Since 1999, she has exhibited her work at the Sculptor and Forum Box galleries and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, among others. Vihriälä has work in the collections of Föreningen Konstsamfundet – Amos Rex, Kiasma, and the Wäinö Aaltonen Museum in 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.

Their sculptural video installations and flowing site-specific murals transform architectures, often integrating the physical context of their environments in order to unsettle any stable orientation or corporeality. As also seen in their woodcuts and reliefs, Ruscica’s relational processes of figurative abstraction and collaging maintain a risky openness to interpretation, sparking visual and material conversations with viewers that can frustrate our automatic practices of de-coding. Attending to the moments when clear meaning disintegrates, Ruscica never portrays a subject but rather shows us how relationships between language, sound, form, and the body are constantly in flux–these animate, nonbinary, in-between moments point to the politics of their practice. Their work queerly refuses the trappings of singular meaning and taxonomic categorization that are used to submit particular subjects or objects to larger systems of power. Instead, Ruscica performatively activates the contradiction and opacity inherent in visual phenomena, their playful iconicity giving way to hybridity, multiplicity, and boundless movement.

Jani Ruscica (b. 1978, Finland/Italy) lives and works in Helsinki. They studied sculpture at Chelsea College of Art & Design in London (BA 2002) and media art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki (MA 2007). Ruscica has held many solo exhibitions, most recently at Kunsthalle Helsinki (2022) and 1646 Art Space in The Hague (2021). Their works have appeared in many international group exhibitions, including Kiran Nadar Museum, New Delhi (2023); 6th Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2023); HAM Helsinki Art Museum (2023); MMOMA, Moscow (2021); AGWA, Perth (2020); and the 1st Riga Biennial (2018). Ruscica has work in the collections of Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Saastamoinen Foundation, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, among others. In 2018, they were awarded the William Thuring main prize.

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 has long been fascinated by the relationship between humans and nature, and by nature as a symbolic source. While his imagery often draws from a kind of scientific categorization, it is not merely a depiction of nature for its own sake. Instead, nature serves as a canvas on which to project the subconscious and emotions, a stage for metaphors. 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.

Persson has long worked with silicone rubber casts, which he paints from the inside to achieve the right organic appearance. Chance plays a crucial role in the creation of these sculptures and serves as an aesthetic expression in its own right. Persson is also known for his many public artworks in Sweden. Made from silicone or painted bronze and aluminium, the works convey playfulness, femininity, colour and conceptuality. Drawing is fundamental to Persson’s practice. He creates large-scale drawings on yellowed paper, meticulously composed with dots, depicting motifs such as cactuses, animal anatomy, or glass cabinets with skeletons inside. These drawings are a kind of complement to the sculptures, suggesting a scientific thrust or an explanation of something elusive.

Roland Persson (b. 1963) is based in Stockholm. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Umeå in 1993, and furthered his studies at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Persson’s academic background is enriched by his interest in theoretical psychoanalysis, which is evident in the subconscious and analytical aspects of his work. Persson’s art has been showcased in solo and group exhibitions across the Nordic countries and Europe, as well as in Russia and Asia. In Finland, his work has been featured in museum exhibitions at Amos Rex and the HAM Helsinki Art Museum in 2024, and he had a solo exhibition at the Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art in Vaasa in 2023.

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.

Bley paints on the floor of her studio in Oslo, pouring and scraping paint over sail cloth and other materials to create layers of colour. She also works on PVC with thick enamel paint, which instead of absorbing into the surface, takes on a sculptural form. Bley has even sewn pockets onto canvases, filling them with organic materials such as tea leaves, dried raspberries, and turmeric. These works are then placed outdoors, which makes the motifs live based on the forces of the weather. Beyond the vivid and shifting qualities of colour, however, the works are also infused with a variety of references to science fiction, science and art history.

The starting point is often personal and emotional, a process guided by intuition and bodily experience. Through countless sketches, the artist explores forms and constellations to find ambivalent spaces or states. Her paintings give a sense of capturing the image in the slow process of its formation and evolution, like an organism of uncertain status. The organic forms can be seen as a kind of social amoeba, functioning both as a large-scale body and as small individual units, wherein Bley questions the common binary division between individual and group in contemporary society.

Ragna Bley (b. 1986, Sweden) lives in Oslo. She holds a BA in Fine Art from the Oslo Art Academy (2011) and an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, London (2015). Bley has had solo exhibitions at Malmö Konsthall, Kunstnernes Hus, OSL Contemporary, Kunsthuset Kabuso, and Downs & Ross in New York, as well as at Pilar Corrias Gallery in London. Her work is included in prestigious collections such as Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Kistefos Museum, Nasjonalmuseet, and Astrup Fearnley Museet in Norway, as well as Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Malmö Konstmuseum, and Statens Konstråd in Sweden.

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.

Alftan creates her pictures from a rigorous process of building form and color from personal observations; working in the studio, she constructs each image from notes and sketches, generating closely cropped scenes that challenge us to contemplate not only what we are seeing, but also what we cannot see beyond the canvas edge.

By nature figurative, Alftan’s works also play with abstraction, exploring the elusive point at which paint is perceived to depict things other than itself—dashed strokes take on the guise of knitwear, black curves turn into eyeliner, and thin washes of color become reflections in a mirror, or in a knife. Recurring windows, doorways, and other framing devices also point literally and metaphorically to the act of viewing, in intimate paintings that describe, rather than represent, the visual world.

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. In recent years, Laitinen has been working extensively with octopuses, producing biomorphic glass habitats for these lifeforms.

Laitinen’s layered and multi-sensorial installations ask questions about the activity and reactions in different ecosystems, moving seamlessly from microscopical particles to society’s power structures to mythologies. Laitinen’s works are proposals for symbiotic contact zones, where different lifeforms and materials are entangled in shapeshifting continuums. Continuous change and material transparency are key features of the works. Laitinen has been influenced by science fiction and philosophies of science and technology that seek new practices for coexistence on Earth.

The installation artist Lap-See Lam (born 1990 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.

She frequently draws on her family’s history, as in Mother’s Tongue (2018), a video installation created with her cousin, Director Wingyee Wu. The film captures the interiors of endangered Chinese restaurants; drawing on her own family’s experience as restaurant owners in Stockholm, she combines the visuals with fictionalized monologues by three generations of women who discuss their working experiences.

Lap-SeeLam continued the theme in Phantom Banquet (2019), produced for the Performa 19 Art Biennial in New York, to examine how artificially created environments can have the power to shape identity. In 2020, Lam was named by American Forbes as one of Europe’s most promising young people in art and culture.

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. 

Born in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1987, Škarnulytė is a consummate explorer—a role necessary for an artist whose primary concerns are global concerns. Educated in Italy and Norway, and working in Berlin and Tromsø, she draws inspiration from ecologically unique locales as far flung and storied as the Arctic Circle, the deserts of the American West, the deserts of the Middle East, nuclear power stations of Europe, Cold War bases, ancient civilizations lost to the seas, and aphotic zones. And, in a vertiginous sense, she links the historical significance of these locales to the quantum and microscopic phenomena that constitute the infinitesimal building blocks of the world with a cinematic vision that scales the more-than-microscopic and to the astronomical. 

These geographical locales and dimensional layers serve as the contexts for her speculative “archaeological” films that reflect on the current world from an imagined future perspective in which the conscious being critically investigates the long-term ecological ramifications of the anthropocentric present. As such, they appear as points of reference in her meditative works, which often position modern myths—like the mystique of the nuclear age—within the grander context of geological deep time in order to ask how did we get here? 

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 – the investigation of socio-cultural phenomena through the sonic as a force over the body, mind, and society. Composing artworks through forms including recorded sound, sculpture and installation, drawing, and live performance, she applies this concept towards the creation of critical artworks that are preoccupied with the way in which context, form, space, and the body of the viewer create experiences that are both somatic and cognitive.

Camille Norment has completed several commissioned works to public spaces. In her current exhibition “Plexus” in Dia Chelsea, New York, Norment has united two large-scale sculptural and sonic installations in the postindustrial spaces of 541 and 545 West 22nd Street through a single sonic composition, with each space forming a dynamic and reflective acoustic environment.
Norment has also performed at institutions including the Munch Museum, Oslo (2021); Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (with Hamid Drake, 2019); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (with Craig Taborn, 2019). Norment’s work “Triplight” was featured at the entrance of the MoMA during the exhibition “Soundings: A Contemporary Score” (2013) and sound installation “Within the Toll” at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (2011).

Norment represented Norway in the 2015 Venice Biennale and has since participated in the Kochi-Muziris (2016), Montreal (2016), Lyon (2017), and Thailand (2018) biennials. She is prorector of research at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. She lives in Oslo.

Viggo Wallensköld began his artistic training at the University of Helsinki’s Piirrustusluokka art class. In 2005, he was named Finland’s Young Artist of the Year. To date, he has held eight exhibitions at the Bäcksbacka Konstsalong gallery. His latest solo show in Helsinki was at Galleria Halmetoja in 2020. He has also exhibited widely in other venues both in Finland and further afield, and his works are featured in leading Finnish art collections. Viggo Wallensköld has published four fiction titles, with the latest two released under the Kustannusosakeyhtiö Siltala imprint.

Painter and author Viggo-Wentzel Renato-Bogislaus Cathmor-Adlerwalt Wallensköld, aka Viggo Wallensköld, depicts life’s absurdity through a series of fictional characters. Over the years, his works, which typically feature just one main character, have come together to form a cohesive entity, a universe all of their own, comprising a series of intertwining themes.

Wallensköld’s paintings explore the physical diversity of humans and our ability to cope with difference. He himself has said that his paintings emerge from a sense of shame, his own experience of otherness. From the early 2000s onwards, he has explored body positivity and non-binary identities. His treatment of these topics is characterised by its restraint and emotional deftness. The people depicted in his paintings do not represent a stereotypical physicality but nevertheless expect to be seen. Visibility matters.

As the artist himself has acknowledged, there is always a touch of the autobiographical in his paintings featuring people, but they are by no means self-portraits, or even portraits for that matter. Often, his imaginary subjects have borrowed poses, outfits and even facial expressions from the artist’s old family photographs, from people Wallensköld himself has never met.

The main character featuring across his literary works is a mycologist that bears more than a passing resemblance to Wallensköld’s father, who himself is an artist with a passion for fungi. The Rabelais-esque atmosphere of Wallensköld’s experimental novels is complemented with illustrations created by the artist himself. Rendered in watercolour and ink using his sublime and highly distinctive technique, his book illustrations have been compiled into series and included in various museum collections.

In technical terms, Wallensköld’s creative process is one of functionality – the approach is determined by the desired outcome and atmosphere. Wallensköld’s brushwork technique ranges from light, single layers of colour to repeated applications of pigment that results in an even finish. The temperature and temperament of his works range from highly expressive to calm tranquillity.

A key theme among Wallensköld’s paintings of people is the link between the organic and the inorganic, between man and machine. His perhaps best-known work on this theme is the machine-human, where a person’s head or another part of their body is connected to a machine that maintains its functions. The machine can be switched on and off, it can be set in hibernation mode or placed on a windowsill, like an ornament. And yet it is partially comprised of an intelligent, sentient person, to whose thoughts we are granted no access. Wallensköld offers us a wonderfully straightforward take on the highly topical and relevant issues of AI, robots and humanity. He deconstructs this angst-inducing topic with considerable skill, rendering it accessible and relatable.

The links between the animate and the inanimate are also the theme running through Wallensköld’s cemetery-themed works, where gravestones and memorials are used to construct portraits of the dead. As with historic photographs, Wallensköld has the ability to bring headstones and plaques to life. Stories build up around them, making their subjects feel real.

When real people are featured in Wallensköld’s portraiture, he often pairs them with an attribute. These symbols are chosen for their ability to open those depicted up to our interpretation. Rather than reaching for birds, cloaks or arrows as commonly seen in religious art, Wallensköld uses a range of everyday, instantly familiar items: bookshelves, furniture, toys. From time to time, a single item is not enough, and he creates an entire interior around his subject, evoking a time and a place that doesn’t exist but can be effortlessly imagined.