‘Social Form’ unites four distinguished female artists from Finland who will all show one lens-based work each, either films or photographs. The title and the works in the exhibition allude to two things: the continued relevance of socially engaged art as an aesthetic practice, and the role of personhood in relations between humans, within any society and between different societies. Social form is an experimental notion. It wants us to open our eyes to all the things that may happen in such meetings.

Kristiina Koskentola (1967, lives in Amsterdam) shows Halflife–Afterlife (2024), a film shot in Japan that combines footage from the nuclear facility at Fukushima, where a major accident happened in 2011, and from a séance with a blind seer establishing contact with the spirit of Koskentola’s deceased father. The film articulates connections between nuclear and spiritual energy, dead matter and life after death.

Production support from Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the Kone Foundation and the Mondriaan Foundation. Collaboration with the performance artist Megumi Shimizu. Soundscape by German Popov.

Anu Pennanen (1975, lives in Helsinki) shows Itä-Pasila (2024), a film that portrays this 1970s area of Helsinki, its brutalist architecture and diverse population. The film is based on conversations with people from different generations and backgrounds, and on collaborative video workshops with some of the young inhabitants. The soundtrack is Jean Sibelius’s First Symphony (1898–99).

Produced by Palo Productions with support from Arts Promotion Centre Finland, AVEK, City of Helsinki, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Niilo Helander Foundation, the Olga and Vilho Linnamo Foundation and the Oskar Öflund Foundation. Made in close collaboration with the Naapuruustalo Pasila community centre.

Ulla Rantanen (1938, lives in Helsinki), best known as a painter and printmaker, shows selected large-scale prints from a series of analogue photographs of Maasai people in their traditional dwelling environment, taken in Kenya in 1997.

Liisa Roberts (1969, lives in Helsinki) shows selected prints from Выбoрг–Vyborg–Wiipuri: A Documentation (2001–unfinished). This series of analogue photographs, shot in front of a window or a view, portray her various collaborators on a long-term project centred on Alvar Aalto’s public library in Viipuri: damaged during the war, rebuilt by the Soviets and later restored by Finnish and Russian experts.