Helsinki Biennial, Helsinki, curated by Blanca de la Torre and Kati Kivinen
The Helsinki Biennial was one of my favourite exhibitions this year because it had the courage to aim for a sustainable and unhurried approach to art – even if, in places, it teetered on the edge of too-familiar green buzzwords. Featuring thirty-seven artists and multiple venues, the biennial formed an ambitious and wide-ranging artistic landscape which, despite the logistical challenges, offered a genuine space for reflection where the idea of shelter became a real, lived experience rather than just another art event.
Villiam Miklos Andersen, Caffè Crema and Madeleine Andersson, Degenerative Knowledge Production, O-Overgaden, Copenhagen
O-Overgaden presented two parallel exhibitions that expanded my understanding of systems, bodies, and power. Villiam Miklos Andersen’s colourful immersive installation transformed the everyday logistics of lorry drivers into a queered sculptural work that exposed and warped normative systems of consumption. Meanwhile, Andersson’s intense video installation laid bare how electricity has historically been used to control, classify, and define the human brain – from early experiments to contemporary AI.
Ursula Reuter Christiansen, I Am Fire and Water, Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj
To move through I Am Fire and Water was like walking through an echo of the radical imagery of 1970s Germany: the raw materiality, the tremors of protest, the vulnerable body in the world. Reuter Christiansen’s works still breathe with the afterlife of her time around Joseph Beuys, yet also stand out strongly against the darkness of our present day. Rotten eggs against bombs; washed-out faces; a whispering voice that says “too late.” All this pushes me towards the question: what does it mean to be human when hope is constantly put to the test? The exhibition hit me like few others. This was one of the year’s strongest art experiences, one where love and the deepest abyss came together in blazing, irresistible images.
– Tue Greenfort is an artist living between Berlin and in the countryside on the Danish island Falster.
For this year’s contributions to the Advent Calendar, see here
Translated from Danish
