SHAPE Helsinki Art Map, Helsinki (2026)

13/01/2026

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include four exhibitions:

📅 At Studio on view is Sara Blosseville’s exhibition ’Tender Devices’, presenting a series of soft screens printed onto recycled fabric. The works were developed alongside Blosseville’s work in the garden and her visits to the oral culture archive at the Finnish Literature Society. Browsing through the archive the artist kept stumbling upon stories that shared the idea of the ground as a conductive net. Blosseville now transposes this idea into a body of work that can be considered as a web of conductivity.

📅 At on view is an excerpt from ’Thermal Womb’ installation by Stine Deja, an artist working with installations with constructed, found and moving-image components. The original installation consisted of five human-sized figures, wrapped in green thermal sleeping bags and suspended upside down inside stainless-steel trays stood on end in small mounds of terracotta-coloured sand. Kohta shows two of these units, but without the sand.

📅 At the exhibition ’emovere, seaweed’ by Nastja Säde Rönkkö & Miroslava Večeřová brings together the practices of the two artists through video, drawing and sculptures. In Vecerova’s works, seaweed is held within copper frames, creating an encounter between organic movement and elemental metal. Rönkkö’s charcoal drawings extend this elemental dialogue. Charcoal, formed from fire and organic material, is a primordial drawing material that registers pressure, breath and gesture with immediacy.

📅 At the exhibition ’The Great Meeting’ by Ruben Risholm presents at its centre a sculptural entity consisting of a group life-sized human figures and a series of reliefs. Risholm carves his works from whole trunks of wood, and in this exhibition he uses only elm. In Risholm’s artistic expression one can find affinities with folk art, traditional craftsmanship, and folklore, yet there is also a vein that reaches all the way back to antiquity and Egypt.

07/01/2026

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include four exhibitions:

📅 2nd year student exhibition The Pit Protects a Single Seed, I Broke my Tooth on the Stone of a Fruit takes place at . “A pit sprouts by first cracking open, with a root emerging from the bottom and a stem from the top. A pit can also refer to a sinkhole…”

📅 On view at is Hollow by Anni Kinnunen. The exhibition is a critical commentary on a time when altered reality is true and nothing can be trusted. The exhibition is part of , taking place 6–11 January. During Lux, the gallery will be open until 22 every night.

📅 At Where the Water Breaks Its Neck: Nukhuko is the first Finnish solo exhibition by Lyuba Sautina, curated by Adel Kim. It presents recent works that explore questions of legacy, belonging, and the rigid frameworks of national identity. Working with textile and mixed-media pieces made from second-hand fabrics, leather, goldwork, embroidery, and found objects, Sautina translates personal experiences into material form.

📅 At the 35th text of the Eurantie Window Publication is written by ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS and designed by Katri Astala. ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS is Chris Gylee and Aslan who have been living their lives together and making art together for almost 16 years now. They stories about Q***r lives and Q***r futures in rurality through a science-fiction lens, often using the Q***r constructed language Damia as an artistic tool. The text is presented in the Damia script, tolpata. An English translation of the text can be found via the QR code in the window.

17/12/2025

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include one exhibitions and three events:

📅 On view at is ‘companion’ by Bogna Luiza Wisniewska (b. 1988, Poland, she/her). “…I want to be as good a companion as marigolds are…
” Bogna Luiza Wisniewska’s practice is rooted in care, fragility, and q***rness, often using the garden as a lens to explore creation and resilience.

📍 Yö’s Winter Salon vol.2 is The Artists’ Association Yö’s second annual Christmas sales event, an art sales exhibition where works are hung salon-style—abundantly and playfully—on the walls: small-scale paintings, photographic prints, graphic works, and sculptures by Yö’s member artists.

📍 is having talkoot and pikkujoulut (pre-Christmas gathering) to celebrate the season together. Also on view is Nora Sayyad’s pop-up exhibition “Visible Palestine (Näkyvä Palestiina)”, part of miniresidency programme. The exhibition is envisioned in three parts. ’Portraits’ feature intimate images that tell the stories of Palestinians and their families, showing how everyday life and resistance coexist. The ’Protests’ section aims to bring together street photography from multiple photographers, highlighting the diversity of communal action and grassroots solidarity. It’s a project where photography and collective effort meet. *Talkoot is a Finnish tradition of communal volunteering, where friends, neighbours or colleagues come together to get something done and share food/snacks and time together.

📍 last gallery tour of the year on 21 December starts at 13:30 from MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre. The tour covers exhibitions at Muu Helsinki Contemporart Art Centre (Nana & Felix), at Forum Box (Antero Kahila + Zagros Manuchar), at gallery Topelius (Christmas Table), and at gallery Halmetoja (Pira Cousin / Sakari Kiuru). The tour lasts 1,5–2 hours and is guided by artist Jane Hughes. The tour is in English and free of charge.

10/12/2025

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include three exhibitions and one event:

📅 At Baran Caginli’s exhibition Lost and Found explores the intersections of materiality and memory through a series of edible bread sculptures that trace the stories of dissected and lost monuments such as from Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, and Moldova. Using temporary materials like bread to reflect on socio-political and cultural histories, the project aims to delve into instances of civil political action involving the subversion of political posture through the theft of small parts, such as fingers or hands. During the exhibition, visitors are invited to participate in a ceremonial act by consuming these reproduced, edible fragments, choosing to eat, share, or keep them like relics.

📅 At in Iina Gröhn’s Evidence of My Existence the artist has since 2020 collected various parts and samples that have shed from her body, such as hair and skin. These tiny remnants, carry traces of time and identity. Through them, the artist examines existence and its constant change. The exhibitions reflects on how most of the building blocks of the human body renew within a decade. When is it a matter of mere change, and when does the change become so irreversible and fundamental that it can be seen as a form of destruction, and thus, the end of one’s current existence?

📅 At Nana & Felix, a Korean-Finnish artist duo’s exhibition Trial Without Error explores how an uncontested strive for absolute safety, highlighted by the desperate try of surveilling even the remotest corners of our surroundings is reshaping our perception of, and behaviour towards, both the natural and human environment.

📍At Christmas Sale Kuva Alumni And Friends runs through the weekend 13-14.12 and features art of all kinds, food and unique gifts.

03/12/2025

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include three events and one exhibition:

📍 December 4 holds a book launch of A Shot in the Factory: Workers into the Frame at Kirjan talo, starting at 4 pm with a film screening ‘A Shot in the Factory’ by Erkko Kivikoski (Laukaus tehtaalla, 1973) (with English subtitles), one of the most radical films made in Finland, that tells the story of a wildcat strike initiated by the workers at a metal factory, who organise against the new management’s profit-oriented push to reduce the workforce. At 6pm the evening continues with a book presentation by the editors Sezgin Boynik and Minna Henriksson, followed by readings and discussion with the authors Marja-Leena Mikkola and Maria Fusco (in Finnish & English), and ends in a music performance by Heli Keinonen.

📅 On view at Mediabox: Leyla (2025) by Zagros Manuchar, a kaleidoscopic short film and description about a Kurdish woman. It consists of Leyla’s childhood photos, farewell letters from friends, a smuggling story, thoughts about her Swedish support family and what it is like to be Leyla and finally be visible.

📍 the renowned Oblivia group marks its 25th anniversary with the Finnish premiere of their captivating music theater performance at . In Reality Bang, Oblivia employs music, text and movement to illuminate the “big bang of reality” and the present day reality we are currently facing (or, perhaps, sometimes do not dare to face) worldwide and in our own societies.

📍 The last session of Catalysti X Art School Maa Lecture Series Fall 2025 is artist talk by Iona Roisin on December 4 at 10-11.30 on Zoom (request link at [email protected]). lona Carmine Roisin (b.1989) is an English artist and poet based in Helsinki. Roisin’s multidisciplinary practice is rooted in the written word, taking the form of moving image, text objects, poetry and organising. They are a member of the Trans publishing collective Almanac Press and co-founder of Trans Library Helsinki.

26/11/2025

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include two events and two exhibitions:

📅 At the exhibition Der Küchenbau by Iiris Kaarlehto is a spatial proposition consisting of sculptural elements and assemblages, engaging with ideas of modern and postmodern interior architecture, personal and domestic spaces, as well as the processes, techniques, and fantasies associated with them. With found, collected, and modified objects, Kaarlehto approaches the memory and layers of meaning embedded in everyday materials and things.

📍 publishing event of Mouthing the Words: texts for performance 2019–2025 by Jaakko Pallasvuo takes place at on 2 December. Mouthing The Words consists of texts written to be performed. Sometimes this means a text written as the initial component to a theatrical production. Sometimes a text has been written to be spoken by someone without much other splendour. The words exist to be said, sung or put into action.

📅 On view at is dylan ray arnold’s exhibition ‘Ageing etc. feelings’, a spatially composed sculptural installation. Sculpted from everyday materials, the work relates to experiences of life, ageing, vitality and decay of both the body and material environments. The works draw from the affective memory of the 1990s domestic sphere, lingering in the body and culture. Reworked domestic textiles, objects, parts of furniture, and fragments of household appliances perform scenes of micro-drama that express both first-person experience and the layered life and relationships of the materials themselves.

📍.helsinki Minna Tarkka Lectures 2025: Collective Imagination in the Era of Optimisation, an annual get-together dedicated to discussing and debating the potential of art, media, and technology in reshaping current and future democratic societies, takes place at and across four days, 1–4 December. See programme and register at: m-cult.org/productions/minna-tarkka-lectures/2025

20/11/2025

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include two events and two exhibitions:
📍 Baltic Circle is an international festival for contemporary theatre and performance, held annually in November in Helsinki. The 22nd edition takes place from November 21st to December 6th, 2025. For more information visit balticcircle.fi.

📅 On view at gallery ‘Total Control’ by Inari Sandell is exhibition exploring instruments of power at the level of objects, societal structures, and information production. The video piece makes use of both surveillance and thermal imaging and is based on the artist’s personal experience of normative exercise of power in a museum space, asking whether all kinds of bodies have safe access to art.
📍 During UA Miniresidency Ruby Louise Rose focuses on her collaboration project with the Outokumpu-based Q***r performance and multidisciplinary art collective ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS. The Q***r science-fiction concept album and live listening event “Seven Songs of Yearning for a New World Sung by a Starship” imagines a starship hurtling through interstellar space carrying a cargo of Q***r refugees setting out on a one-way journey in search of a new home far from this world. The artist will give a short talk followed by live performance of the work-in-progress. Where: Nordic Culture Point (Suomenlinna B 28).

📅 At the exhibition ‘Tea Bladder’ by Iiris Riihimäki features a selection of recent paintings (in oil on canvas, with some variations) and painting-related objects, mapping how the natural world, in itself beyond taste, is claimed by humans as a tool for imposing their own world-view.

12/11/2025

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include four exhibitions:

📅 In Jyri Ala-Ruona’s exhibition APPARITIONS the paintings refer to energy flows and changes in the forms of energy. Stemming from personal history, the artist examines energy consumption and the relationship between painting and photography as manifestations of neuroticism.

📅 On view at Edris Samani’s newest work titled Lifeloop in which the centerpiece is a zoetrope, one of the earliest forms of animation, for which Samani has envisioned life as a continuous cycle – wherein everything is connected, transient, with no true beginning or end. Life is an endless motion of recurring days, nights, months, years, emotions, and experiences – which pass and repeat.

📅 .uniarts Academy of Fine Arts is resuming exchange exhibitions after a five-year break by joining forces with Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). The name of the exhibition, Einladung/Kutsu, draws from the idea of invitation – people are invited to come along, to stay and to interact.

📅 At until 14 November, s̶o̶r̶r̶y̶ is a show about text and texting, images as texts and texts as images, communication and connection, holding memory encrypted, keeping memory private in the public, oversharing, making sure we remember, making sure we keep in touch, trying to archive information and failing, renaming, imagining counter-languages, practicing q***r languages, saying all the things we have to say, speaking with an accent, talking talking talking about love, rejecting nationhood, tricking state control, questioning the I, self-censoring, defying censorship, mythologising the passing of time, humourizing the myth, only suggesting a narrative, failing to learn, loving to learn hard. Curated by Micol Curatolo, s̶o̶r̶r̶y̶ features work from Yujie Zhou, nadiye, ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS & Joni Judén, and Ora H., that explore language and storytelling, sharing tender and tentative attempts at a different communication.

24/09/2025

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include two events, one exhibition, and one installation:

📍.helsinki Taking place on Sept 25th Protocols for Melting by Joonas Hyvönen and Līga Spunde is a site-specific augmented reality walk, leading participants through forest trails of Helsinki Central Park and into the quiet landscapes of the Great Cemetery in Riga. Walk starting point: Maunula House at 5pm. 18:30–19:45 Artist talk (in English) & discussion with activists Susanna Pitkänen and Mina Laamo on Helsinki City’s plan to establish a site for snow dumping (in Finnish).

📍 is organising Positioning A Symposium on Curatorial Thinking in the Nordic-Baltic Region & Beyond, co-hosted by Amos Rex and Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, dedicated to curatorial thinking and publicness, bringing together artists, curators, and cultural workers from across the Nordic-Baltic region and beyond to share ideas, commission new works, and open dialogue between local and international contemporary art practices. Free and open for all. Note! Monday 29th and Thursday 2nd are fully booked. Read more at positioningsymposium.com

📅 On view at Venla Helenius’s new video work Destina. Destina takes as its starting point the femme-enfant figures painted by surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning in the 1940s and 1950s - figures that once rebelled against their prescribed role in art history, celebrating their unruly potential and creating autonomous surreal realities within domestic-like spaces.

📅 As a part of the InCollection exhibition series by EMMA and Saastamoinen Foundation, the kinetic installation Chiming Forest by Antti Laitinen invites us to consider humanity’s capacity and means to shape the natural world. The work is constructed from wood sourced throughout southern Finland, including brushwood left behind in logged areas and root systems of trees felled by wind.

17/09/2025

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include two events and two exhibitions:

📍 Field_Notes – Living Methodologies is held across two days and consists of ’Learning Endings: Ecologies of Care in Arts-Sciences Collaborations’ by Aleksija Neimanis and Astrida Neimanis on 17 Sept 2025 18:30—20:00, and ’SING Sábme – decolonizing science as a way of strengthening Sámi governance in settler colonial Europe’ by May-Britt Öhman on 19 Sep 2025 18:30—20:00 at Kilpisjärvi Biological Station and online. Both events are held in English.

📍Co-organised by and the Contemporary Performance Stage of Helsinki City Theatre, Discussion: The Work of a Curator in Contemporary Performance (held in Finnish), today September 17th, 18:00-19:30 at Tekstin Talo.

📅 Opening September 19th the group exhibition LET IT BE KNOWN, I AM STILL HERE features works by Liisa Ryynänen, Ronya Hirsma, Kristina Sedlerova Villanen, Mari Sunna and comissioned poem by Iona Carmine Roisin.

📅 Artists’ Island 2025 is a group exhibition featuring 26 artists, held on Harakka Island 10.–28.9.2025. The exhibition is a continuation of the Artists’ Island exhibitions held in 2021 and 2023 and is curated by Antti Kauppinen.

10/09/2025

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include four exhibitions:

📅 At Maija Majakka’s solo exhibition Pygmalion, featuring hand-built ceramic sculptures, the human being is the main focus. The new body of work deals with the construction and construction of the human figure into a particular mould and expectations. Pygmalion was a sculptor from ancient myths who carved a female figure from ivory to his own specifications and fell in love with it.

📅 In Kristin Wiking’s Wrestlers we witness an encounter between two opponents. In Wiking’s work, two inflatable puppets meet and test their light bodies against each other. When automated fans switch on, the characters come to life, seemingly moving on their own – gaining strength only to soon lose it again.

📅 Maria Pääkkönen’s solo exhibition Aikaikkuna.

📅 Opening on the 12th at .uniarts the 2025 BFA exhibition features works by 26 graduating Bachelor’s Fine Arts students.

03/09/2025

Updated weekly, SHAPE introduces and highlights a variety of current public events and exhibitions throughout the city.

This week’s highlights include one event and three exhibitions:

The exhibition at is filled with a large patchwork backdrop, a temporary shelter, protective paper held up by sticks. Scattered throughout the space are photographs printed on handmade paper with natural dyes extracted from stinging nettles, seaweed, tansy, and other plants. The materials used in the works were sourced from parks and beaches around Helsinki, collected from trash cans and thrift stores, or donated by friends.

is opening on September 3 Aalto ARTS Grad Show 2025 showcasing the final projects of students graduating in architecture, design, film, art, and media. The show is a collection of 10 exhibitions, several film screenings and one performance.

The exhibition at Yö Galleria Vaihdokas/Changeling combines printmaking and audiovisual works, weaving together the world of folklore in the stories of changelings, the examination of bodily impressions and playful modulations of species-typical movement. The prints, realized on cold-worked glass and mirrors, take shape through the viewer’s gaze—one that the artworks seem to absorb and claim as their own.

is having their eighth edition of Bloom, the biannual young artists’ exhibition. Bloom exhibits the works of Finnish or Finland-based artists and artisans under the age of 35.

SHAPE Helsinki Art Map