HIAHTUS25
Haihatus Art Center’s 25th Anniversary Fine Arts Summer Exhibition HAIHATUS25 hosts works in various mediums and genres by contemporary artists in Finland and internationally. Haihatus Art Centre, located in the municipality of Joutsa in Central Finland, celebrates its long history of inviting artists from different backgrounds and practices.
HIAHTUS25
Haihatus Art Centre’s 25th Anniversary Summer Exhibition
15.6.–25.8.2024
Art Centre Haihtus, Joutsa
Haihatus Art Center’s 25th Anniversary Fine Arts Summer Exhibition HAIHATUS25****hosts works in various mediums and genres by contemporary artists in Finland and internationally. Haihatus Art Centre, located in the municipality of Joutsa in Central Finland, celebrates its long history of inviting artists from different backgrounds and practices.
HAIHATUS25 features new and recent art by artists primarily based in Finland, showcasing a variety of works in multiple media, including painting, sculpture, VR, photography, printmaking, and film. This must-see exhibition is a unique window into all areas of the contemporary art world in Finland. The exhibition is curated by Elham Rahmati, Ali Akbar Mehta, Jenna Jauhiainen and Julius Valve. The group exhibition opens on June 15th.
The artists in this exhibition seek to confront and challenge the tendencies and trajectories shaping the world today. Through this exhibition, they provoke and facilitate critical, timely conversations centred on the intersections of identity, self-image, equality, systemic, structural racial injustice, and discrimination based on ethnicity, class, religion, sexual orientation, and gender, among other things. More broadly, the lasting events that have shaped the past few years and beyond—from the pandemic to the reckoning around anti-coloniality and racial justice—make this exhibition’s conversations and voices more salient now than ever.
Celebrating the 25th anniversary of Taidelaitos Haihatus, the HAIHATUS25 -exhibition is a relevant marker of conversations brought forward from spaces traditionally left on the margins in contemporary art’s national and international contexts. What constitutes the ‘margins’? And who gets to calculate, measure or communicate, with any precise method, the marginality of any lived experience? The centre-margins relationship cannot be understood as a fixed, in a straight line, or as binary, but as hierarchies and power dynamics rooted in geopolitics and social relations, and must be articulated as such.
Artists: Bogna Luiza Wisniewska, Juliana Irene Smith, Golrokh Nafisi, Jade Lönnqvist, Minjee Hwang Kim, Nayab Noor Ikram, Paola Fernanda Guzmán Figueroa, Uzair Amjad, August Joensalo, AnnaKarima Wane, and Samra Šabanovic, Sheung Yiu, Sakari Vinko, Minni Välipakka, Alma Tuuva (@pikakahvimemegirl), Lada Suomenrinne, Azar Saiyar, Bruno Moreschi and Bernardo Fontes, Adnan Mirza, Jenni Laiti, Gülbeden Kulbay, Gabrielė Gervickaitė, Piergiorgio Colone, Camille Auer and Joss Allen.
A note on my contribution to the exhibition:
“How can artistic practices enact care webs that enable co-constituted, interdependent subjects to repair, rebuild, and cultivate wills for resistance and solidarity amid, and in the aftermath of, experiences of overwhelming negative affect in increasingly hostile environments? For the HAIHATUS25 -exhibition, I collaborated with artists and filmmakers whose work traces identities, personal stories, disciplines and ideas that, through various perceptions, explore this very question. They recognise and challenge emotions that are not supposed to be felt because they may evoke crises, and get in the way of expectations of who we are and what our lives should be. They offer poignant reflections on notions of interpersonal dynamics, romantic love and its many nuances, longing and belonging, generational trauma, feminist sisterhoods and imagining internationalist solidarities.
Bogna Luiza Wisniewska, Juliana Irene Smith, Golrokh Nafisi, Jade Lönnqvist, Minjee Hwang Kim, Nayab Noor Ikram, Paola Fernanda Guzmán Figueroa, Uzair Amjad, August Joensalo, Anna Karima Wane, and Samra Šabanovic are all among the many artists whose presence, works and perspectives in the past years have gradually transformed the Finnish art scene into a more exciting, playful, receptive and subversive space (that is, these days, maybe a little less wary of confrontation). I’d like to believe there is an understanding amongst us all: merely sharing one’s experience doesn’t bring the wall down, but it can certainly help us keep going. In Sara Ahmed’s words, “Once we find each other, so much else becomes possible.””
Poster design: Samar Zureik