Haihatus25

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.

HAIHATUS25 will showcase artworks from various periods of Haihatus’ history, as well as pieces by newcomers, at the Fantasia-house gallery space and Haihatus yard, which will also feature the communal art project Voimametsä. These segments are curated by Risto Puurunen, Panu Ollikainen, and Kaisa Vigman, the artistic director of Voimametsä. As an independent part of the Haihatus Summer Exhibition, the House of Kinetic Arts KITA presents a new exhibition titled “Invisibility” curated by Tuomo Vuoteenoma.