In Finland, the long Covid lull makes local artists and dialogue appear in a new light.
The first edition of the Helsinki Biennial is installed around a lush island in the archipelago, and emphasises an empathic and ritualised relationship to nature.
‘Repatriation is about so much more than just the objects’, say Sámi artists Petra Laiti and Outi Pieski, curators of an exhibition about the historic event at the Finnish National Museum this autumn.
Public art is on the rise in the Nordic art scene, as Helsinki follows Oslo in starting a new biennial.
New artistic director of Checkpoint Helsinki Paul O’Neill marks the anniversary of the October Revolution with an exhibition in a small apartment and a large congressional center.
A recent performance in Helsinki by artist Theaster Gates resulted in a new and unexpected perspective on the city.
Tommi Grönlund and Petteri Nisunen were central to the Nordic 90’s generation. Their retrospective at Kunsthalle Helsinki is consistent, playful and surprisingly universal.
The city council of Helsinki has voted against the proposal for a Guggenheim Helsinki. The project will be remembered as a failed collaboration on cultural politics.
The EMMA museum in Espoo, Finland, celebrates ten years since its inauguration with a new exhibition series about time, gaze and the imprints made by human conditions. The first edition oscillates between inertia and provocation.
In Helsinki, discussions about Alice Neel, Niki de St Phalle, Yayoi Kusama and Mona Hatoum emphasize clichéd female attributes. A counter strategy is to read them through classic feminist theory.
The Tallinn district of Kalamaja is the urban stage for the project City Agents, where the search for new economical skills and spaces for living are given visual and material form.
The Tom of Finland exhibition at Kunsthalle Helsinki is the largest to date to feature the gay hero, yet it misses the opportunity to contextualize his work as an artist.
What does it mean to be important in the art world? Marie Karlberg’s Stockholm show answers the question, one oversized business card at a time.
The feminist exhibition No Master Territories at Kunstnernes Hus unfolds as an open research project that can be extended and reconfigured through new voices.
Strong reactions from European leaders to Russia’s participation in this year’s biennial. Danish minister open to boicott.
Contemporary art’s rhetoric of doom has become a comfortable cliché, as the scramble for relevance turns resistance into a risk-free, legible aesthetic.
