6 Standout Artists to Know at the Helsinki Biennial

The city of Helsinki is made up of an archipelago, its harbor offering ferries to a range of stunning watery landscapes. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that a biennial here would take advantage of this environment.

Entitled “New Directions May Emerge,” the Helsinki Biennial, now in its second edition and on view through September 17th, includes 29 artists and collectives from Finland and around the world, focusing on how the natural world can offer new perspectives, a kind of “contamination.” (That phrasing comes from a quote from anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s 2021 book The Mushroom at the End of the World.) The Biennial, said curator Joasia Krysia, hopes to learn from the art of “[accepting] that contamination is part of our life, and an inevitable, irreversible part.” By taking notice of neglected natural resources like bugs and bacteria, instead of rejecting them, we can find new ways to approach the world, she explained.

Several works are installed at the Helsinki Art Museum, but many more are dotted around the nearby island of Vallisaari, creating a sort of treasure hunt for the viewer as they wander the coastal paths. Krysia explained that the Biennial “places emphasis on the works that subtly operate in dialogue with the surrounding environment, and its unique ecosystem, giving voice to the islands itself and to its inhabitants.” The island’s many species of moths, for example, are the stars of a work by Lotta Petronella, who turned them into a series of tarot cards, in collaboration with Sami Tallberg and Lau Nau. Many of the works include digital components, accessible through visitors’ phones.

Water is a theme in many of the artists’ work, reflecting the importance of this precious natural resource in our changing climate. Tabita Rezaire’s video Deep Down Tidal (2017), for instance, takes the ocean as its subject and explores the interconnected narratives of colonialism and information exchange, with an early internet aesthetic.

Meanwhile on Vallisaari, the archipelagic setting gives greater force to Matti Aikio’s video and sound installation Oikos (2023), named after the ancient Greek term for home (the root of the word “ecology”). In his film, videos of shimmering seascapes are superimposed onto snowy landscapes with herds of reindeer (which the artist, who is Sámi, grew up with), suggesting the interconnections between these two natural environments, and the threat to both if humans continue to plunder the Earth’s natural resources.

Here, we highlight six key artists from the Biennial to look out for.

Suzanne Treister

B. 1958, London. Lives and works in London.

How will humans survive our ecological planetary crisis? Suzanne Treister’s series “Technoshamanic Systems: New Cosmological Models for Survival” (2020–21) comprises 185 watercolors that visualize alternative systems for surviving in outer space, beyond the extractive and exploitative strategies that many human societies have stuck with for centuries.

In this site-specific installation for the Helsinki Biennial, many of Treister’s soft, intricate drawings, which include esoteric phrases, like “Interplanetary Meditation Island,” are hung on the walls in a small cabin, giving a glimpse into the artist’s worldbuilding impulses. These small works on paper illustrate the scientific and legal systems, as well as clothes and habitats, of this post-apocalyptic society.

In an additional AR component of the work, viewers can also watch a colorful constellation of the artist’s “biosphere islands” appear floating high in the sky, bringing Treister’s imaginative vision to (digital) life.

Alma Heikkilä

B. 1984, Pälkäne, Finland. Lives and works in Helsinki.

In the middle of the woods is a plaster sculpture. Knobbly and white, it could be a species of mushroom or a decaying tree trunk. Enclosed within the white fabric walls of Alma Heikkilä’s installation coadapted with (2023), the sculpture will sit in this outdoor location for the duration of the Biennial. Throughout this timeframe, dyes produced from plants on the island and nearby will drip onto the sculpture, slowly turning this blank canvas into a speckled, colorful creation. The surrounding fabric walls offer a preview: lime-green, fluid shapes are dotted around the structure’s surface.

In this durational work, Heikkilä, whose work was also shown in the 11th Gwangju Biennale in 2016, sees her work as collaborating with materials themselves. Here, it makes one of the most explicit gestures to the Biennial’s theme of contamination. How can plants and natural phenomena collaborate in the process of artmaking and produce something new?

Adrián Villar Rojas

B. 1980, Rosario, Argentina. Lives and works nomadically.

Adrián Villar Rojas is known for his large-scale sculptures that point to the catastrophic decaying of the natural world. Referencing the losses and absences of extinction, his works are often impactful statements that teeter on the edge of fragility. For a new series produced specifically for the Helsinki Biennial, the Argentine artist has used a suite of different software that modeled world conditions in various virtual environments: this software determined how his sculptures would be altered, whether through war, gravity, or fire.

On the Biennial’s island, the resulting sculptures (simply titled From the Series The End of Imagination, 2023) are almost camouflaged within the surrounding nature: an incongruous blue-and-red shape hanging from a tree could almost be a beehive, for example. Up close, these sculptures are weird mashups of organic shapes and mechanical-seeming elements, in melting, tentacular forms. Placed within the greenery of Helsinki’s archipelago, they appear like remnants of alternative futures: some apocalyptic, some fertile.

Tuula Närhinen

B. 1967, Finland. Lives and works in Helsinki.

The ocean is full of plastic—it’s a sad, undeniable fact. Tuula Närhinen’s practice stems from beachcombing, she explained to Artsy at the Biennial’s opening. “That’s where it all started,” she said. In her work The Plastic Horizon (2019–23), tucked into a cave-like building on Vallisaari Island, though sourced from another nearby island, the accumulation of all this found material is sorted into colors and turned into a rainbow, running around the length of the room. The collection of objects includes straws, bottle tops, toys, and endless, anonymous strips, their use now forgotten. These bright colors attract marine life, and cause destruction in habitats across the world.

In another installation work in the Helsinki Art Museum, Deep Time Deposits: Tidal Impressions of the River Thames (2020), Närhinen presents cyanotypes featuring objects found over a period of months from central waterway in London. The works on paper are positioned meticulously, corresponding to the height of the river depth when the items were found. These cyanotypes were also exposed on that same day, and so the depth of color functions as an additional representation of environmental conditions. Running around two of the museum’s huge walls, this work explores the interplay between climatic factors and the river’s detritus, reminding us of the cyclic nature of ecology. Though there must be hundreds of objects displayed as part of the installation, Närhinen has one favorite: a delicate, white, porcelain pipe.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

B. 1995, UK. Lives and works in Berlin.

A trio of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s figures meets explorers to Vallisaari Island: They look like regal scarecrows, presiding over a pile of wood that sits between them. It’s one of five sets of figures that form stations of pilgrimage around several sites on the island. Each figure is draped in a specially designed fabric, emblazoned with dark computer-generated graphics and the phrase “I can’t take this step for you.”

The phrase also features in an interactive online experience that takes viewers on a corresponding digital pilgrimage through several esoteric YouTube videos. In the artist’s characteristic crossover between poetic meditation and video game aesthetic (also visible in the artist’s recent show at David Kordansky Gallery, “I GET HOME SAFE”), the game asks its audience to imagine having the bravery to work towards a journey’s end point entirely alone: “Do you have the bravery to step into a journey that is completely unknown to you?” it asks.

The figures represent semi-fictionalized Black trans characters, whose narratives of pilgrimage are also part of the online program. Indeed, the concept of an internal pilgrimage, when framed in these terms, seems to encourage empathy with the journey of self-discovery many trans people go on in order to understand how they want to interact with the world.

Jenna Sutela

B. 1983, Turku, Finland. Lives and works in Berlin.