24.4.–17.5.2026

Inertia, inaction, a slow unrelenting and constant movement, gradual crumbling

There is a line, beyond which your traces will disappear, or become impossible to decipher.
There will come a time, when the traces you leave will be lost underneath other times, and your traces will become impossible to decipher.
And the traces of everyone you’ve ever known, and everyone you will ever know.

(Your traces will become wordless, silent, nameless, material.)

You (will) become part of the scenery.*

Petra Vehviläinen’s exhibition Inertia explores the knowledge carried by materials: its drifting, transmission and disappearance. The body of work is grounded on rugs woven by the artist’s late grandmother Aune – a Karelian evacuee – and found scrap steel, which form a shared landscape.

The sculptures form silent, slowly but inevitably decaying archives that record physical labour and rhythm, and the histories the materials used: old jeans and sweatshirts of ants, uncles and cousins; data cabinet doors found in ditches; metal housings of fluorescent lights; and foot grilles.

Petra Vehviläinen is a Helsinki-based visual artist. She works with sculptural installations, drawing on traditional craft techniques such as forging, blacksmithing, metal casting, and weaving. Vehviläinen’s practice often features works in which discarded or found objects and materials form spatial weaves. Her works explore themes rooted in posthumanism and new materialism, emphasizing the active role of matter, materials, and space in these processes.

Vehviläinen’s works have been presented not only in gallery settings but also site-specifically in urban and natural locations, both in Finland and abroad. She holds a MFA in Sculpture (2024) and a MA in Directing (2013) from the University of the Arts Helsinki. Her projects have been supported by the Alfred Kordelin Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, and the Kone Foundation. In 2024, she was awarded the Grönqvist Scholarship by the Hélène and Walter Grönqvist Foundation to support her artistic work.

The exhibition has been supported by the Finnish Arts and Culture Agency and the Greta and Alfred Runerberg Foundation.

*English translation by Roy Boswell