17 October – 15 November 2026

MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre
Cable Factory, Tallberginkatu 1 C, Helsinki, Finland
Open: Tue–Fri 12–17, Sat-Sun 12–16

Opening Saturday 17 October 2026, at 13:00 – 16:00
Opening speech: chairperson of MUU Minka Heino

The joint exhibition Chim* by Salla Myllylä and Sari Palosaari consists of video and sculpture installations. The exhibition draws inspiration from overlapping temporal and spatial experiences of the two artists in the industrial town Kemi in Sea Lapland. The exhibition is part of the MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre’s 2026 program titled ‘Where is the North’.

Chim* The name of Kemi area in medieval maps

The exhibition has been supported by Finnish Arts and Culture Agency and Kone Foundation.

The starting point for Salla Myllylä‘s video installation Kajavakari is a family story taking place in Kemi in the 1970s. Myllylä’s grandfather occasionally stayed overnight on Kajavakari island in a small cabin constructed by his son using discarded wooden packing crates obtained from the nearby Veitsiluoto paper mill. Since there was no means of communication with the mainland, Myllylä’s grandmother would sometimes get worried and climb to the 13th-floor roof terrace of the city hall to look through the coin-operated binoculars to see if there was any movement on the island. Later, in the autumn of 1982, storm Mauri swept the cabin away, and permission to build a new one was denied.

In her video work, Myllylä recreates the act of looking in the story by filming the island from the same location through a telescope. The air mass between the telescope and the island acts as an optical lens changing with temperature and humidity, distorting and swaying the observation. The installation transforms the movement of gaze through the landscape into a movement of the projected image on the gallery wall.

The substrate for Sari Palosaari’s spatial ensemble is an embodied memory of a sculpture that once stood in the courtyard of her mother’s workplace. In the 1980s, Aimo Taleva’s sculpture Metto stood on the grounds of the Kemi vocational school. To pass the time in the afternoons, Palosaari would cycle over to play on the sculpture’s spiral pedestal and beneath its wings. The pedestal’s spiraling movement and the felt pull of gravity invited a bodily engagement, while the open wings of the capercaillie carried the imagination. The artwork was discarded in connection with the institution’s move, but was later relocated to the city center near the shoreline, to the same area where Palosaari’s mother also later moved.

In Palosaari’s piece, the soft animal of your body, she translates this experience into the industrial architecture of the exhibition space, probing the movement it suggests as filtered through recollection. The piece is made of found metal fragments and supporting architectural structures. The title of the piece is an excerpt from Mary Oliver’s poem, Wild Geese.

SALLA MYLLYLÄ is a Helsinki-based visual artist and doctoral candidate in the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki. Her moving image practice is site-specific and spatial. In her video works, often based on time-lapse photography, Myllylä tracks changes caused by weather, the seasons, and human activity at a chosen location. Her video installations are shown for the first time at the very sites where they were filmed. Her research explores the act of framing from the perspectives of both the image-maker and the viewer.

Myllylä’s works have been presented in exhibitions at e.g. Kemi Historical Museum (2025), Galleria Forum Box (2024), Mänttä Art Festival (2024), Hietsu Pavilion (2021), and Galleria G (2021), as well as in public spaces, including the switch festival in Nenagh, Ireland (2022), the media screen at the Helsinki Music Centre (2019), and the Seoul Metro (2015).

SARI PALOSAARI is a visual artist and sculptor born in Kemi, currently living and working in Helsinki. In her work, she draws from an expanded concept of the built environment. In this all encompassing habitat, materials, energies, and forces intertwine in a continuous, transforming metabolism. She works her materials with simple gestures and through the means of assemblage. The sculptures form spatial ensembles.

Palosaari’s works have been presented in group exhibitions such as the Art Ii Biennial as part of the Oulu26 European Cultural Capital program, at the University of Helsinki Department of Geophysics as part of the Synzoochory exhibition series 2025, the Helsinki Biennial 2021, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (2019-20). Her most recent solo exhibitions were at Gallery Forum Box (2026) and Galleria Sculptor (2023).