21 artists have been selected for Haihatus’ summer exhibition – one of them is a dog.
The Haihatus summer exhibition brings together 21 artists and artist groups approaching the rhizome theme from multiple perspectives. The gallery house features bio art, living materials such as microbes and artificial ecosystems, interactive ceramic works, spatial installations, glass art, and projections.
The theme is explored through philosophical, punk-inspired, scientific, and queer perspectives. Multispecies coexistence takes concrete form in the work of Neris the dog.
The rhizome installations form small universes that can be experienced immersively. In the sculpture park, the scale expands: the works astonish and invite not only observation, but also play and exploration.
ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION
Timo Ahjotuli
Timo Ahjotuli is a sculptor and installation artist working in Koisjärvi, Lohja. His works are constructed from polygonal triangular forms across a range of scales, operating at the intersection of organic, mechanical, and digital aesthetics. Ahjotuli’s practice is best known for large-scale sculptural installations that combine strong craftsmanship, spatial thinking, and poetic sensitivity—expanding through spaces and structures like an ever-eroding mycelial network.
Andy Best & Merja Puustinen
Media and visual artists Andy Best & Merja Puustinen specialize in provocative interventions in gallery, museum, and urban spaces. Their works often address societal themes in a physical and playful manner.
Puustinen and Best also work as curators and producers in large-scale international productions. Their most recent project is Imagining Godzilla, a Baltic Sea initiative carried out by sailing between 2024 and 2026, involving approximately 50 international artists.
Andy Best is a sculptor, lecturer, and Professor of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki. Merja Puustinen is a visual artist, producer, and doctoral researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts.
Toni Essel
Toni Essel is a media artist and lecturer in media studies based in Jyväskylä. Through his works, he seeks to make visible the often unconscious motives that influence human behavior. Essel’s recent works comment on the decline of biodiversity. The pieces are based on ink paintings created using compressed air. Resembling mycelial networks and neural tissue, the works emerge in a process akin to evolution: from original forms strongly shaped by chance, only a small number develop into finished artworks.
Jude Griebel
Jude Griebel is a Canadian sculptor whose works probe the intersections between consumerism, ecology, and myth—translating environmental precarity into carefully crafted, allegorical forms. The mechanics of consumerism is a driving theme behind his sculptures, with a specific focus on the factory food system and its implications for land depletion and climate shift.
Aw/oT
Art without Transportation (Aw/oT) is a curatorial proposition to find and test ways of presenting international art in Finland, without shipping artwork or artists across the globe. This project is the newest branch of the multifaceted platform Äkkigalleria, run by Anna Ruth and Juho Jäppinen, and currently funded by the Kone Foundation.
Wheat Woven by Jude Griebel is the 6th Aw/oT project. This project was assisted by carpenter Quinn Mäkelä, who realised this piece while in residency at Haihatus April 2026.
Anu Halmesmaa
Anu Halmesmaa is a sculptor based in Turku, whose practice centers on spatial sculptural ensembles. In her works, she explores the relationship between humans and nature, corporeality, and the tension between mortality and immortality.
In 2025, Halmesmaa presented the exhibition The Formula of Immortality at the Kilta Gallery of WAM – Turku City Art Museum. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree and is a member of the Finnish Sculptors’ Association.
“Within the works, immortality is not an end goal or a solution, but a continuous movement—a tentative attempt to understand and accept the finitude of human life. The construction of illusion becomes a means to approach what cannot be fully confronted: death, disappearance, and cycles larger than the self.
At the same time, the works ask what happens when humans distance themselves from the natural process of dying and attempt to control it. Could the illusion of immortality ultimately alienate us from life itself? Or is it precisely this illusion that keeps us in motion—building, searching, and reaching toward something that always remains just out of reach?”
instagram: @anuhalmesmaa
Kaarina Haka
Kaarina Haka’s works resemble abstract paintings unfolded into space as three-dimensional forms. Her installations—made of fabric, wire, and recycled materials—appear to float in the air, affecting the viewer in a bodily and experiential way.
Haka has been developing her “spatial paintings” and site-specific, suspended textile-based installations for over two decades, and her position within the canon of Finnish installation art is significant. A graduate of the Painting Department at the Academy of Fine Arts, she is also trained as a metal artisan and is one of the founding members of Gallery Huuto.
Instagram: @kaarinahaka
mariel Helovirta
mariel Helovirta is a visual artist based in Turku, working primarily with photography, textiles, and installation. Performativity and embodiment play a strong role in their processes.
“Thematically, I move sinuously between tensions and intersections of identity, queerness, and non-human agents, as well as in the exploration of community.”
For Helovirta, mycelium serves as a way to conceptualize and understand all artistic activity.
Instagram: @kammarielain
Anni Keskipoikela
Anni Keskipoikela is a visual artist and art educator working in Tampere. Her practice is rooted in nature-related themes, and she is interested in the potential of visual art to create and strengthen our relationship with nature.
Working primarily with ceramics and engaging with themes such as illness and deviation, Keskipoikela reflects on connections and transience as part of nature and its cycles. She develops these themes by repeating forms, textures, and colors of various decomposers and symbiotic species in her works.
KISS MY ARS
Kiss My ARS is a queer, artist-run DIY gallery based in Kumpula. The gallery is committed to highlighting LGBTQ+ artists and activist voices. Kiss My ARS is an Apartheid Free Zone (AFZ), supporting the BDS movement and Palestinian human rights. The gallery was founded in September 2024.
Performance and visual artists Leik Silvestrini and Kaisla Kyyhkynen operate behind the gallery and present a participatory work in the Haihatus summer exhibition.
Leik Silvestrini (they/them)
Leik Silvestrini is a Norwegian performance and visual artist based in Helsinki. They are inspired by fungal mycelium and its ability to invisibly connect everything around it. Leik creates costumes and characters through which alternative narratives emerge, infiltrating everyday situations with humor and playfulness. Their art arises from encounters and questions, and the outcome always surprises—even the artist themselves.
Kaisla Kyyhkynen (she/they)
Kaisla Kyyhkynen is a Helsinki-based artist who grew up in Käpylä, with roots extending to Joutsa, on the shores of Lake Suontee. Her childhood memories include rich mushroom forests there, and she remains a passionate forager.
Familiar with Haihatus since childhood, she later engaged more deeply through an internship at the Academy of Fine Arts. Kyyhkynen is interested in spatial, haptic, and material-driven art that challenges conventional ways of seeing and invites audiences to step inside the artwork.
Working Group Annina Mannila, Risto Puurunen & Panu Ollikainen
The installation Portti / Gate by Risto Puurunen, Panu Ollikainen, and Annina Mannila produces sensory “glitches” in reality through 3D shadow techniques, kinetic sculptures, water-projected photography, and soundscapes.
The work invites visitors into a surreal living room filled with illusions, and further—behind the projected imagery—into the “engine room” of the piece itself. Gate merges and reshapes key elements from the artists’ previous works.
The Working Group:
Risto Puurunen is a DIY-oriented musician and visual artist based in Joutsa, known for the cult band Cleaning Women and as a central figure in Haihatus.
Panu Ollikainen, originally from Kuopio and now based in Helsinki, works with sculpture, painting, and installation, exploring human–environment relationships and temporality.
Annina Mannila is a photographer working in photojournalism and fine art, combining documentary photography with video and installation. She lives and works in Tampere.
Mögart co
The artist behind Mögart co has been active in DIY and punk scenes since the 1990s. Without formal art education, their skills are self-taught through experimentation and practice.
Works under the name Mögart co have been produced since 2023, primarily as collages made from recycled materials, with a stylistic approach rooted in “Frankensteinism.” Mögart co is a founding member of the Turku Collage Club and part of the PEHM collective.
Neris the Dog
Neris (b. 2017) is a mixed-breed rescue dog adopted from Romania to Finland. Neris is known for annual “stick galleries,” the first of which opened in 2021.
In summer 2025, Neris’s sticks were presented as the Stickelius Monument as part of a dog-oriented sightseeing route in Töölö, Helsinki.
Neris lives and collects sticks in Kannelmäki (Helsinki) and Matinkylä (Espoo), where seasonal exhibitions of collected sticks are held each autumn.
Using natural materials—found, fallen, or broken branches—Neris selects materials intuitively and carefully. Each stick reflects different stages of decomposition and may bear traces of insects, fungi, moss, or even humans.
Each selection highlights individuality.
For Neris, who is neurodivergent and sensitive, the act of searching, retrieving, chewing, and carrying sticks home is a natural, meaningful, and confidence-building activity—perhaps even a calling.
Gabriella Presnal
Gabriella Presnal is a Finnish-American multidisciplinary artist. Born in Germany and having grown up living in countries like Sweden, Canada, and multiple states in the U.S., they have been living in Finland for the past 7 years and have recently lived in Copenhagen, Denmark. Their work can be seen from May to September at the Generation 2026 triennial at Amos Rex in Helsinki.
“As a form of biomimetic organizing and design, mycelium could allow a more subversive, non-linear, and non-hierarchical way of structuring in our communities.”
Risto Puurunen
Risto Puurunen is a self-taught musician and visual artist who builds both his instruments and artworks from scrap materials and wire. His artistic practice includes mobile Camera Obscura installations as well as immersive spatial works that make use of light, shadows, and 3D glasses.
He is especially known as a member of Cleaning Women, with whom he has performed internationally, accompanied silent films live, and composed music for documentary films.
In addition, Puurunen is an important figure in Haihatus, where he is involved in the association that maintains its activities and also owns the properties managed by the association.
Katja Rauhamäki
Katja Rauhamäki is a glass artist working in Laukaa in a century-old studio building. Aged window glass—marked by time and lived experience—is her primary material. Transparent, distorting, and fragile, glass mirrors the nature of memory.
Rauhamäki creates mycelium-like structures from glass—remnants of memory frames, “memories of light, soul, and the spirit of matter.”
Minja Revonkorpi
Minja Revonkorpi is a visual artist based in Jyväskylä working across various techniques. Inspired by biodiversity and mysticism, her works explore visible and hidden life forms through fiction.
Each living element becomes its own small universe. When all life forms symbiotically interact, mycelial networks, mutations, and imaginary species emerge—strange multiplicities of life. These networks can also be seen as metaphors for human society.
Johanna Rotko
Johanna Rotko is a visual artist working with living materials, particularly beneficial microbes such as yeast and mold used in fermentation. Her work explores power relations, transience, disappearance, transformation, and time through bio art and photography.
“My practice is unified by the idea of mycelium: a living network that spreads, intertwines, and seeks new directions without a single controlling center.”
Katja Skinnari
Katja Skinnari is a visual artist working in painting, primarily ink on paper or canvas. Her works are portraits exploring humanity, empathy, and human experience.
Recently, she has used found textiles such as embroidered lace as material. Central themes include meaning, nostalgia, and transience.
Jonna Suurhasko
Jonna Suurhasko is a plant and installation artist based in Jyväskylä. She creates artificial ecosystems for plants, where recycled materials, moss, and vegetation intertwine into life-sustaining systems.
Emmi Tavela
Emmi Tavela is a visual artist from Tampere, living and working in the outer archipelago of Porvoo. She has held solo exhibitions since 2002 and participated in numerous group shows and art fairs.
Primarily a painter, her work often centers on silence, perception, and transience. At Haihatus, she presents her first installation Do You Hear the Sound of Life, composed of paint rags spreading across the floor and fabric flowers growing from them—making the act of painting visible.
emmitavela.com
Rose-Mari Torpo
Rose-Mari Torpo is a Helsinki-based visual artist whose primary medium is painting. Alongside painting, she creates color-based installations that expand painting into spatial experience.
Since graduating from the Free Art School in 2003, she has exhibited widely in Finland and internationally. Her work explores the relationship between color and movement through intuitive experimentation, often using recycled materials to create immersive, evolving environments where light, color, and space extend beyond the traditional frame of painting.
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