The artists invited to the Den exhibition are Corinna Helenelund, Ninni Luhtasaari, Mari Oikarinen, Organic Sound Society, James Prevett, Iida Valmé and the working group Tero Harju, Tuuli Malla and Erja Taskinen.
Iida Valmé
ida Valmé (born 1999 in Boston, MA, USA, all pronouns) is a Finnish-Haitian-American queer multidisciplinary artist with an international practice currently based in Helsinki. Love is at the centre of their practice. Their work and creative process draw power from their community, nature, intuition, and the spiritual realm. Valmé’s existence and expression is a direct homage to their ancestors and a declaration of love to those whose ancestor they will one day be.
Mari Oikarinen
Mari Oikarinen (born 1981 in Suomussalmi, Finland) is a visual artist who lives and works in Rovaniemi. She works with structural wood sculptures, drawing and textile materials. Oikarinen’s work is based on a dialogue with her materials and the use of craft methods such as carving, sewing, embroidering, cutting and sawing. The slowness of her methods opens up space for thinking and for new ideas to emerge. In her art, Oikarinen is interested in the spectrum of human existence, its vulnerability and its strange beauty.
Ninni Luhtasaari
Ninni Luhtasaari (born 1987 in Espoo, Finland), a visual artist and musician based in Tampere, explores themes of embodiment, shame and the subconscious through ceramic fountains and hand-embroidered textile art. Recently, the artist has been thinking about the mixing of spaces and roles. Luhtasaari’s studio is located in her home, where family life spills over into art and vice versa. As a next step, the artist plans to dive into the worlds of karaoke, machine embroidery and public art.
Erja Taskinen, Tuuli Malla ja Tero Harju
Erja Taskinen (born 1986 in Ivalo, Finland) is a multicultural visual artist who makes images for work and pleasure. She is fascinated by the visual language around us and how visuality can both support and mislead the viewer. Since our personal interpretations of things and phenomena are always different from those of others, the mainstream interpretation is the safest. But how do you create visually striking content that is different from the ordinary?
Tuuli Malla (born 1990 in Tornio, Finland) is a performance and installation artist whose work begins with listening to people and places. She is often in the role of a visitor, which challenges her to be sensitive to what is happening around her and to reflect on where trust comes from and how it is earned. Tuuli Malla has been creating sound installations for outdoor and indoor exhibition spaces since 2015. While making Kueʹtt, she particularly enjoyed carving wood in the balmy late summer air.
Tero Harju (born 1980 in Ivalo, Finland) writes lyrics, poems and short stories in Finnish and Skolt Sami. For him, building wooden structures is a job and a hobby that has been passed down from generation to generation. Working together and creating a space for storytelling through texts, music and gatherings of people are at the heart of his work.
Corinna Helenelund
Corinna Helenelund (born 1985 in Helsinki) is an artist based in Helsinki. Helenelund has been creating textile sculptures and installations for the past 10 years. As a starting point for her work, the artist identifies points of intersection between the inner and outer world: how our emotional world affects our experience of the environment and how the spaces we move through affect our well-being. In recent years, Helenelund’s artistic work has been guided by light and rest, as well as changes that cause people to spend more time at ground level: years with a small child, illness or meditation practice.
James Prevett
James Prevett is an artist born in Cambridge, UK and living in Helsinki since 2013. He makes things to gather around – objects, events, text, video that are often combined as sculpture. James enjoys collaborating with other people, embracing the open-ended and poly-vocal approach that comes with making things together. He thinks everybody can and should ‘make’, and that this can bring unexpected beauty to the world. He is a Lecturer in Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts of Uniarts Helsinki and spends his free time in books and walking his dog Lulu.
Organic Sound Society
Organic Sound Society was founded by Maarit Bau Mustonen and James Prevett as a loose collective for people without musical training who wanted to make sound together. Organic Sound Society meets regularly to play together, and they also set up their instruments in other spaces for people to enjoy and play together. Visitors to the exhibition can play the homemade instruments at any time.