13–30.11.2025

Naomi & Wanda Holopainen: meet me at dawn
J. Toarie Strandman: Xenogensis
Sirpa Jokinen: Places with Variable Lights
Sebastian Reis & Andreas Behn Eschenburg: Here and There

Four exhibitions that were set to take place in Maa-Tila Project Space this autumn are instead realised together with HIAP at Gallery Augusta.

Maa-Tila Project Space operated in Sörnäinen from 2016 until June 2025. Due to the sudden termination of the Art Promoting Centre’s operating grant, Art School Maa had to give up its popular and valued space in June 2025. Upon receiving the news, Art School Maa’s neighbour HIAP offered help and solidarity and the concrete gesture of collaborating in order to realise Maa-Tila’s programming.

Maa-Tila’s autumn programme was curated by the gallery’s Programming Committee for 2024-2025 including Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Minjee Hwang Kim, Yilin Ma together with Maa-Tila’s coordinator Emma Lilja.

The issues and tensions that arise from austerity measures and devaluing art and culture require collective efforts. We want to welcome you to four singular exhibitions hosted simultaneously in one gallery. They offer different takes on artistic thought and practice and together also celebrate the many ways in which we can work together in times of austerity.

Warmest thank you to the artists and everyone who has worked to make the exhibitions possible.

The exhibition fees have been supported by the National Heritage Agency. We want to thank the Agency for their flexibility with the changes to Maa-Tila’s exhibition schedule and for offering this important subsidy towards paying artists for their work.

Opening Event: Wednesday 12 August, 17.00 – 20.00

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Sirpa Jokinen – Places with Variable Lights

The video projection ‘The Lake Light’ (2025) is shot at a lake bottom. The sunlight reaches deep down. A wind at land also happens at the bottom.The camera has been taken down from the boat at incidental places, at numerous depths and variable light circumstances.

The landscape at the bottom serves as The Terra Incognita for an explorer searching for a place to identify with when the hazy light filtered by the water guides her.

The soundscape has been recorded from the surface of the lake with self-built contact microphones and amplifiers attached to floating objects.

The camera shoots, in the projected video ‘I am searching for the house where I lived ‘(2025) as the eyes of a person who forgot where she lived a long time ago and is searching for that place day and night. One is moving in an unnamed city with ruins and buildings about to be demolished. The video is made of black and white stillshots.

Installation work ‘Found Library‘ consists of books that have been found arbitrarily with bookmarks placed in them. The bookmark is left as a souvenir from an imaginary place which someone reached when reading the book.

The exhibition aims to show new ways to look at and discover one’s surroundings.

Events alongside Sirpa’s exhibition in Gallery Augusta:

14.11, 16:00–18:00 — Soundscape improvisation with Sirpa Jokinen, Jaakko Kuikka & Juha Rautio. Open participation (bring instrument or voice).

28.11, 16:00–18:00 — Helsinki Improvisers Orchestra. Gather at 16:00 to plan; concert 17:00–18:00.

29.11, 15:00–16:00 — Concert: Assi Karttunen (organetto), Jaakko Kuikka (shakuhachi), Siboné Oroza (voice) & Sirpa Jokinen (chimes) performing with the lake soundscape.

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Naomi & Wanda Holopainen – meet me at dawn

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J. Toarie Strandman – Xenogensis

Xenogenesis is a solo exhibition by J. Toarie Strandman.

The exhibition features sculptures and installations made of biomaterials that Strandman has developed through material research.

Xenogenesis refers to Octavia E. Butler’s sci-fi trilogy in which humans have destroyed the Earth and an alien species saves humanity by merging genetically with humans. It also refers to a biological process where an offspring is produced that is unlike either parent.

Entropy scatters energy into chaos – life connects energy into intertwined entities. All living is in a constant vibration, trying to vibrate at the same pace, connect, communicate and form symbiosis.

The exhibition imagines post-human futures and unknown evolutionary paths, in which different species communicate and create symbiosis beyond the boundaries of human cultures and languages. It imagines alien lifeforms emerging from melting permafrost or outer space, and accidentally creating mirror lifeforms changing life as we know it.

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Sebastian Reis & Andreas Behn Eschenburg – Here and There

Here and There is an exhibition featuring the works of two artists who explore ideas of image- making and image-finding. They both draw from lived experiences and moments of mundanity, using that as a starting point for their work. Through a process of transferring, manipulating, painting, and superimposing the image on paper or canvas, fragments are created that point towards their own potential as images in which further ideas are explored.

Sebastian Reis’s approach emerges from synthesising subjective experiences with culture-historical and art-historical occurrences, exploring larger time scales. In his work, he often explores the contradiction between monumentality and ephemerality.

“Orrida Bellezza is a body of work in which I examine ideas of exploration and discovery. As a starting point for the exhibited works, I use photographs of piles of snow, grit, ice, and dirt in mundane urban settings that resemble miniature landscapes. In the process, I print, cut out, and transfer the images, overpaint them, and adjoin them with free-standing wooden structures.”

Andreas Behn Eschenburg sees individual paintings as elements that are there to point towards the next painting. They reflect on themselves and the world around them, in which they begin to exist.

“The paintings are windows to places, dreams, and memories. They are lucid dreams and moments of confusion. They are the image of a dream that lingers for a moment after waking up, before it fades away. They are paintings of memories so real that one could touch them, yet they are completely immaterial. The paintings are the passing landscapes seen from the corner of my eye, and the whispers heard in the distance. They are paintings of what I believe to find behind distant horizons and of the burning desire to venture further out. I have been and lived in these paintings. They are images of places where no human being can live, yet I call them home.”