Curated by María Villa, Kemê Pellicer, Lotta Esko
13.3 – 6.4.2025
Opening/Avajaiset 14.3.2025

Becoming Many is a multifaceted reflection on the many ways we are undone, made, and remade by each other. The works of twelve artists and practitioners come together to reflect on how our lives aren’t just our individual lives but are deeply weaved with the lives of others.

Few experiences are as radically grounding and at once capable of shaking our ground as the experience of caring for others in the every day, sustaining their lives, listening to them with our heart, being there with our entire being, or trying to be despite strains, complex circumstances or competing desires.  Kinship, chosen or not, has the power to shape who we are in ways we may not suspect, to split us apart, and give us unexpected courage and resilience, but it can also drain us physically and emotionally to the very last reserve. It can be as fulfilling and generous as it is demanding. Kinship changes us over time in such fundamental ways that if those “many” we become were to be extracted from the picture of who we are, we might not be able to recognize ourselves.

Becoming Many intends to bounce between the personal, the political, and the collective; it is an exhibition reflecting on the constant challenges and (often invisible) negotiations we enter when caring for others —be them our elders, children, or dependent adults in our families, whether biological or chosen— while wanting to thrive as art and culture workers. Artistic methods and practices using widely varied mediums bring unique perspectives to the exhibition to share personal experiences, positionalities, and stories of caregiving, parenthood, intergenerational bonds, reproductive labour, insane practical juggling of tasks, and deep reckonings with love and friendship. We ask: how do kinship and responsibility for others shape our life and vision of the world? And how do they affect other aspects of our identity? We also investigate the overlaps between artistic life and issues of ability, vulnerability, migration, norms, artistic and professional precarity, activism, and interdependence.

With works by:
Christian Fernández Mirón
Diana Soria Hernández
Eevi Tolvanen + Jussi Ulkuniemi
Ida Nisonen
Kemê
Lotta Esko
Maryam Haji
Minna Suoniemi
Orlan Ohtonen + Niko Wearden
María Villa

Program

Openings:
March 13th : 11.00-14.00 soup will be served. Artists’ gathering and discussion.
March 14th: 18.00 Vernissage

Events:
March 21 (Friday): 13.00-16.00, Visit, Kemê’s Nuclear Care Constellation I – Be_ing Many. One-to-one conversations and interactions with the piece and the artist.
March 27 (Thursday): book presentation with Christian Fernandez Mirón. Location TBC
March 28 (Friday): Lullaby Circle – workshop with Christian Fernandez Mirón. Location TBC
March 28 (Friday): 18.00 Performance: Crush[ing] by Queer Dance Group and Eevi Tolvanen
April 4 (Friday) 13.00-16.00: Visit, Kemê’s Nuclear Care Constellation I – Be_ing Many. One-to-one conversations and interactions with the piece and the artist.

Finnisages:
April 5th (Saturday): 14.00, Kiila Outing, gathering tour and conversation.
April 5th (Saturday): 17.00, Performance by Diana Soria Hernández.

Other events and confirmations will be added soon. Follow us at https://becomingmany.tumblr.com/

Becoming Many presents a kaleidoscope of relations, paradoxes and practices of care:

Christian Fernández Mirón, A Diary of Parenthood/ Un Diario de Crianza. A journal telling of 7 years of waiting, 24 hours of notice, 7 days of life, when a baby came into his and his husband’s life. A small earthquake. Texts and drawings recount the first two years of an upbringing outside the norm, the vicissitudes and the discoveries that come with being an adoptive and LGTBI+ family in Spain today. Challenges, reliefs, reflections, vindications, anecdotes and learnings give shape to this very personal story. Produced by hand in Risograph by La Escocesa (Barcelona).

Diana Soria Hernández, Practical Matters (performance, clay vessels, text). Soria addresses her experience of dealing with her mother’s sickness and death in the distance. Living in Finland, she found herself unable to provide everyday care for her mother in Mexico. As her mother passed away, she then had to travel to take care of the countless practical chores and actions required after someone’s death. The situation of frailty and mortality we all eventually face overlaps with the displacement of being a migrant, an artist, and a mother of a small child herself.

Eevi Tolvanen presents the ongoing collective process Queer Generations project with photos by Jussi Ulkuniemi in Myymälä2’s Process Wall. They will share the work in progress of this three-year initiative bringing together queer and trans people across large generational gaps through dance, music,  and love letters. They will hold a reading performance and gathering in the gallery during the exhibition.

Ida Nisonen, Oracle / Oraakki  (installation, domestic objects, video performance and text, 2024). This work explores, from the perspectives of both an artist and a mother, the significance of domestic work, maintenance, and care in relation to creativity. It reflects on the creation of art as integral to an equitable, fulfilling life, while also advocating for artistic freedom for mothers.

Kemê. Nuclear Care Constellation I (Be_ing Many), installation. A tent made of cotton fabrics contains the silhouettes of her closest family members connected in such a way that the fabric and threads convey their actual care relationships. A temple dedicated to the complexities of intergenerational care where visitors can have individual experiences or reflections. A cotton sky, mute and perpetually hosting our skin, fluids, and dreams. A place of sweet surrender.

Lotta Esko. Milk (oil painting). This work explores historical and mythological questions of trans-species breastfeeding. Traditional feminine reproductive labour and human exceptionalism are revisited by reminding humans of our animality, challenging stereotypes of female passivity and discussing practices of ecological care, domestication, and bonding. Nursing is a locus of wild controversies still today: from the power dynamics entangled in this practice, to the cultural impositions of gender and fertility roles, and the prevalence of essentializing biological narratives.

Meri-Helmi Särkkä. Rewritten in the Shell (intervened drawings on wall). Her work is a purposeful exploration of paradox, memory, faith, and the beauty of intercultural hybridity. The frame is her family relationship in Finland with a Finn and her condition as a Bahraini migrant, which she unpacks in her artistic work as shaped by a spectrum of identities. Far from dwelling on an individual point of view, her work has a deeper religious and cultural meaning about respect, honour, and responsibility, which constantly conflicts with the Western norm on personal autonomy.

Minna Suoniemi. Side/Bond (2021, 4K video, stereo sound, 5’10) Bond portrays a mother and son in what appears to be a wrestling bond that the mother repeatedly attempts to escape without succeeding. Closeness and battle intertwine in the protagonists’ bodily struggle. Teenage and menopausal bodies tormented with hormonal changes negotiate their coexistence.

Orlan Ohtonen + Niko Wearden All of the words that are not likeis an artwork, or a practice, or possibly doing something together. it is about what is like, what is like needed and, hating emails, erm, and yeah, like, not knowing or, how it always feels like the wrong moment or, then, otherwise, then, like. an attempt to use the technologies of an exhibition about caregiving towards an actual praxis of care – at least enough to make one artwork.

María Villa, as an independent curator, researcher and facilitator, María has supported the discussions with the group of artists, as well as organized activist spaces of dialogue and creative writing with varied artists and practitioners, particularly with the Adres in the Arts group (in collaboration with Kemê), and with the Feminist Book Club she coordinates in Helsinki.

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