11.4 – 4.5.2025
Opening/Avajaiset 10.4.2025 18:00 – 20:00

Restless explores the disruptive nature of non-normative identity in a shared context. The exhibition looks to map the friction between body and environment, and the restlessness caused by the slipping in and out of fixed categories and conceptions. Restlessness is defined as an initiator of disruption resulting from the collective and individual felt experience of this sensation.

The exhibition comprises individuals from a broad range of geographies and artistic practices who have found themselves living and working in Helsinki. Their perspectives include explorations of queerness, disability, and racialization. In Restless, they examine different ways their bodies and identities have reacted to this new place and, in turn, the way the environment responds to their presence.

With works by:
Zara Asgher
Francesca Bogani Amadori
Laura Hasanen
Saara Mahbouba
Fran Trento
Genietta Varsi

Zara Asgher (she/her)

Visual artist/ art educator – zara.asgher@outlook.com

Zara Asgher is a visual artist and educator from Lahore, Pakistan, currently living and practicing in Finland. Through the act of drawing and painting she examines social structures that shape embodied experiences of gender and sexuality. This interest extends to how these power dynamics shift when one moves from a familiar cultural context to a different one.

Repetition plays a central role in this process—through repetition, norms take hold, structuring our movements, desires, and ways of being. By tracing moments where the body slips—where it disconnects from itself, where friction exposes the instability of what is expected— Asgher explores how new modes of sensing and becoming emerge.

Asgher holds a BFA from National College of Arts, Lahore. She was awarded a full scholarship to pursue an MA in Nordic Visual Studies and Art Education at Aalto University, Finland.

Francesca Bogani Amadori (she/they)
Visual artist/ artist researcher – https://francescaboganiamadori.com | francescabogama@gmail.com

Francesca Bogani Amadori (b. 1990) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Helsinki. Their work explores how the ordinary, through embedded structures of power, shapes the experiences of self. Their work employs everyday elements, such as objects, data, video and sound documentation, actions, and experiences, often involving the (de)construction and (re)contextualization of both matter and being. Their recent projects examine the interdependence between place and individuals through performance, walking, mapping, and active listening.

Bogani Amadori’s work unfolds in various mediums, including sculpture, audiovisual installations, video art, photography, soundscapes, sound walks, and writing. They hold an MA in New Media Production and Design and a minor in Visual Cultures, Curating, and Contemporary Art from Aalto University. They also have a BFA with a specialization in Sculpture from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.

Laura Hasanen (she/her)
Visual artist / art educator – lm.hasanen@gmail.com | hasanenlaura.com

Laura Hasanen is a visual artist and art educator based in Helsinki. She works across sculpture, paper-making, video, and installation. Her practice explores topics related to identity, gender, and (non)normativity, with an emphasis on tactile processes and material exploration. Drawing from personal experience, her work investigates the body as a site of knowledge, making visible the sensate and affective impressions made upon the body by the social, cultural, and political contexts it inhabits.
She holds an MA in Nordic Visual Studies and Art Education from Aalto University and Bachelors in Fine Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Saara Mahbouba (she/her)
Visual Artist / Artistic Researcher – https://saaramahbouba.com | mahboubasaara@gmail.com

Saara Mahbouba is a Helsinki based visual artist, artistic researcher, and writer interested in the intersection of identity and labor. Her practice is informed by a mix of critical theory and pop culture, using popular media to make her research interests more widely accessible. Saara’s work often draws on her own experience, exploring the complexity of identities that are neither fully within nor outside of categories of hegemony and otherness. She also works with public programming, both independently and as a part of Helsinki based arts and community organizations.
Saara has an MA in Visual Cultures, Curating, and Contemporary Art from Aalto University and a BA from New York University.

Fran Trento (they/them)
Artist Researcher – https://frantrento.com | frantrento@tuta.com

Fran Trento (b. Brazil, 1987) is an artist-researcher living in Helsinki, Finland. Fran is currently a university researcher at the Department of Geosciences and Geography at Helsinki University and holds a PhD in Communications and Semiotics (Media Studies) at PUC-São Paulo. They develop multimodal art in diverse media, such as photography, text, video, and performances, having exhibited their work at Galleria Loisti, Myymällä2, Örö Fortress Island ORES Summer Exhibition, Stoa, and other places. Fran is interested in performance art, non-dyadic modalities of togetherness, photography and performance art.

Genietta Varsi (she/her)
Sculptor / Artist researcher – https://www.geniettavarsi.com | geniettavarsilari@gmail.com

Genietta Varsi is a Peruvian artist based between Helsinki and Peru. From a sculptural and somatic perspective she materially investigates the systems that conform humans and territories, with a special interest in body-territory flows. She produces works involving human beings and human fluids as materials and mediums; and develops objects, machines, choreographies, actions, diagrams and texts to propose ways of being, moving and relating. Her work mixes biological, ecological and social systems, thinking critically about how bodies are transformed and transforming the paces in which they are immersed.

She has a BFA with a major in Sculpture from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and an MA in Arts and Media with a major in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art from Aalto University, Finland. She has participated in several residencies such as FAAP in São Paulo, Molten Capital in Santiago de Chile, and Delfina Foundation in London.

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