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.