25.4.–21.9.2025
4th floor
Tickets: with a museum ticket

Dafna Maimon creates quietly humorous depictions of human beings who are not always aware of their own bodies’ needs amid the demands of contemporary existence – a state viewers may recognise from their own lives.

About the exhibition

Dafna Maimon’s exhibition at Kiasma opens up the human body, inviting its varied components and symptoms to sprout up and sprawl out around us.

Visitors pass through a velvety intestinal tunnel and a cave-sized wisdom tooth to see artworks such as a series of pastel paintings showing mysterious internal worlds. We also encounter an enlarged tardigrade, one of the world’s toughest microscopic creatures, as well as noted proponent of the mind-body split René Descartes, who appears in Maimon’s musical installation Homebody – and whose dualistic worldview is challenged throughout the exhibition.

Tools for living more meaningful lives

The exhibition includes video installations, paintings on velvet, sculptures and drawings.

Three video works follow fictional characters immersed in modern-day lifestyles whose bodies communicate different signs and symptoms. In her work, these symptoms are considered signs of bodily wisdom that, if listened to, can provide us with tools for living more meaningful lives.

Maimon’s most recent video installation, Homebody, premieres at Kiasma. In addition, a live musical expanding on Homebody’s themes and characters will be staged at Kiasma Theatre in August 2025.

About the artist

In her artistic process, Dafna Maimon (b. 1982, Porvoo) explores how and to what effect bodily knowledge is ignored in today’s society. She thinks of our bodies as carrying the joys and sorrows of being human and manifesting them in a diverse range of symptoms.

In fictional and semi-autobiographical narratives, she surveys the ways in which humans handle recollections, stereotypes, abjection and traumatic experiences. In particular, her work deconstructs patriarchal structures and plays with them through exaggeration, subversion and re-contextualization. The study of diverse forms of community and belongingness is another throughline of her practice, as is the realization of long-term collaborative processes. Her humorous and often absurd approach taps deep into the human narrative and its vessel: the human body.

Maimon’s work has been shown at institutions and art spaces such as Helsinki Biennial, Kunst-Werke (Berlin), PS1 Moma (New York) and Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp. She lives and works in Berlin.