The Oulu Art Museum’s group exhibition Listen to the Dust (26.6.-27.10.2024) features nine invited artists whose artistic practice and works in the exhibition are connected with earth, dust and change.
The exhibition also includes works from the collections of the Oulu Art Museum and the Aine Art Museum by Anni Arffman, Lauri Astala, Ilkka Halso, Ulla Harju, Tuula Lehtinen, Anni Rapinoja and Aarre Viinikanoja.
Read more about the invited artists:
Katariina Guthwert (born 1979) is a visual artist based in Helsinki who works primarily with ceramics. In recent years, Guthwert’s art has explored themes related to earth, water and religion. Finding clay in nature and using it as a material for art is an essential part of her artistic practice. In addition to natural clay, Guthwert uses stone and glazed ash from plants, trees and seaweed. Since 2021, Guthwert has been using Kainuu kaolin from Puolanka in her ceramics. She is involved in the Wild Clay Association, which organises an annual kaolin festival in Puolanka.
Photograph: Pinja Valja
Marja Helander (born 1965) is a Sámi photographer and video artist. Her recent work has focused on the bleak post-colonial landscapes of Sápmi, and in particular the traces left by the global mining industry, where the encounter between nature and man has been destructive rather than harmonious.
Marianna Henriksson (born 1983 in Helsinki) is a harpsichordist based in Helsinki, Finland, who performs in various ensembles and as a soloist in Finland and internationally. Henriksson is particularly interested in the relationship between early music and contemporary art. Together with choreographer Anna Mustonen, she has created performances that combine early Baroque music and contemporary dance, such as Monteverdi’s Maria Vesper (2018) and Eros (2022), a work based on the music of Barbara Strozzi. Henriksson’s artistic doctorate (in progress) explores the relationship between 17th-century musical affects and the physiological concepts of the time, and the implementation of these affects on contemporary interdisciplinary stages.
Photograph: Henni Hyvärinen
Flis Holland (born in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK) is a Helsinki-based artist who follows the collisions of trans and celestial bodies. Co-opting a tool dreamt up by US military, they switched places with a rock-eating microbe and ingested a meteorite. The tumors that soon swelled in their uterus have been fertile ground for a series of works. Questions of trans diagnosis and healthcare are one focus of Holland’s inquiry; more broadly they try to loosen the link between seeing a body and knowing it.
Photograph: Flis Holland
Liisa-Irmelen Liwata (born 1998 in Helsinki) is a Finnish-Congolese visual artist based in Helsinki. Through sculpture and writing, her work explores the human relationship with the land from a nationalist and geographical perspective. Connections between body, earth and language are often present in her work. Having grown up at the crossroads of different cultures, Liwata is interested in exploring the place where being is intertwined.
Photograph: Petri Summanen
Mayumi Niiranen-Hisatomi (born 1983 in Osaka) is a Japanese visual artist who lives and works in Kajaani, Finland. Her art uses ancient techniques and materials – such as weaving and urushi lacquer – and combines them with painting, textiles and installations. Niiranen-Hisatomi’s art focuses on the meaning and importance of ancient knowledge, the work of others, the durability of objects and their impact on the environment.
Photograph: Niina Kestilä
Milla-Kariina Oja (born 1976 in Oulu) is a Helsinki-based visual artist working with photography and moving image. Her work focuses on video installations that combine experimentation with performativity. The themes of the works arise from the fundamental questions of existence. The focus is on the human condition in the world, both in the built environment and as part of nature and its cycles.
Photograph: Milla-Kariina Oja
Shubhangi Singh (born 1984, Mumbai) is a visual artist living and working in Helsinki. Her work explores ideas of absence and the absent as a way of reflecting on the visible, particularly in relation to history, memory and the work of memorialisation. Routinely oscillating between fiction and non-fiction and working across media, from text to moving image to site-specific installations, Singh often adopts the position of the unreliable narrator.
Photograph: C. Lee
Niina Tervo (born 1983 in Oulu) is a sculptor who lives and works in Helsinki. Trained as a biologist, she mines science for emotion through artistic thinking. For Listen to the Dust, Tervo has explored the forms and rhythms associated with meadows and plants in an attempt to discover a new language for the human body. The work brings together the poetry of death, its connection to the earth, its continuity, its verbalisation and its mystery.
Photograph: Niina Tervo
