6.8. – 4.10.2026

This inchoate and potentially infinite list of words are intended as a ‘concept generator’ for The art of, a group exhibition grounded in looking at visual art, architecture and design and wondering how they can be brought together to enhance each other:

Its three curators, all based in Helsinki, are Anders Kreuger (Sweden, 1965), Dr. Markus Lähteenmäki (Finland, 1988) and Dr. Mika Savela (Finland, 1978). Anders is a curator and writer specialising on contemporary visual art and the director of Kohta. Markus and Mika are historians, theoreticians and curators of architecture and visual art.

Our experience and expertise intersect in the expanded field that The art of addresses. The exhibition suggests actual crossovers between usually distinct areas, stimulating processes of becoming that our chosen keywords only begin to name.

Those words betray a preponderance for interiority, an insistence on the untranslatable Teutonic notion of Gestaltung (only partially explicable as ‘articulation’ or ‘expression’ and ultimately to do with translating from inner life to objective reality). Yet the exhibition is not a plea for withdrawal into a protective internal space but rather a cry for engagement with the difficulties facing all of us now.

The themes that the keywords pull together are to do with comprehending and inhabiting the spaces that surround us, and ultimately about wanting to feel at home in the world. They specifically emerge from discussions about the built environment – exterior and interior in every sense of these words – as a constituent part of what art is, a condition and a context for work within that wider field that the exhibition is trying to outline through the four practices it features.

These relate and respond to the ‘concept generator’ on both deeper and shallower levels, bringing together distinct practices such as painting, installation, graphic design, exhibition design or flower arrangement and meditating on cultural tropes that are commonplace because they remain commonly relatable and relevant: natural and enhanced memory, tradition and innovation, creation and loss, authorship and anonymity.

L’Esprit de L’Escalier, exhibition design for Unbuilt Helsinki at the Finnish Museum of Architecture, 2012
L’Esprit de L’Escalier, exhibition design for Unbuilt Helsinki at the Finnish Museum of Architecture, 2012

L’Esprit de l’Escalier is an international project set up in Helsinki in 2012 to expand the practice of publishing as a creative process. When creating under this label, its authors prefer to remain anonymous. The ironic French expression literally translates as ‘staircase wit’ (being able to respond to someone else’s witticism only once we find ourselves at the bottom of the stairs) but may also be rendered as ‘afterwit’. As a brand name of sorts, it plays with modernism’s belief in singularity and purity of spirit.

The project labels itself as ‘a publishing house for unwritten, unbuilt, unpublished words, sounds and images: commissioned, translated, read, sung, performed or remixed’. It has produced a diverse body of work, ranging from books and records to exhibitions, installations and interventions in the built environment. It engages both with archives of existing and historical creative practice and the production of new work, often in dialogue with architecture as a form of thinking, making and doing.

Like the other practices featured in The art of, L’Esprit de l’Escalier may be understood in relation to the concept of ‘prudence’ in classical rhetorical theory. In On Invention (ca 84 BCE), Cicero provides almost tautological definitions: ‘Prudence is the knowledge of what is good, what is bad and what is neither good nor bad. Its parts are memory, intelligence, foresight. Memory is the faculty by which the mind recalls what has happened. Intelligence is the faculty by which it ascertains what is. Foresight is the faculty by which it is seen that something is going to occur before it occurs.’1

L’Esprit de l’Escalier often conveys a sensation of being suspended between foresight and hindsight. Revisiting an act of counter-factual historical revisionism, the project exhibits a metal display table made for the Unbuilt Helsinki exhibition at the Finnish Museum of Architecture in 2012–13. Some of the models of unrealised architecture for Helsinki that were originally displayed on it, such as Sigurd Frosterus’s central railway station (1904) or P.E. Blomstedt’s Alko factory (1935), also resurface here, along with books, posters, vinyl records and record covers. Among other things on and around the table, viewers will find a new signage system (2016) for Merihaka, a 1970s waterfront estate in central Helsinki, and designs for the Kulttuurisauna (Culture Sauna) in the same area. A machine-woven linen tapestry based on Raili and Reima Pietilä’s proposal for a church at the Malmi suburb (1967), a series of experimental Year Cubes executed with Oiva Toikka (2014) and a ceramic wall piece based on a mural that Le Corbusier imposed on Eileen Gray’s iconic E-1027 villa on the French Riviera (1938–39, later in turn defaced by anonymous graffiti) complete this afterwit-infused re-rendering of things that could have been, would have been, yet on some level – if only that of the speculative and generative archive – simply are what they are.

Henrietta Lehtonen (Finland, 1965) was trained as an architect and emerged on the international art scene in the early phase of the ‘relational aesthetics’ wave of the mid-1990s. She contributed a boundary-defying intervention (a raised platform, furniture and crockery for the museum cafeteria) to the 1994 group exhibition This is the show and the show is many things at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium, which has become a popular case study for the academic discipline of exhibition history. In her work Lehtonen has continued to collapse categories such as drawing, sculpture or informal small-scale architecture, and in recent years she has pursued a parallel career as an exhibition architect.

Early installations such as Nest (Reconstruction of a nest I built 5 years old. At the age of 18 I started to study architecture) (1995) offer hands-on interpretations of the ‘memory palace’, a term from classical antiquity put back into circulation by Frances Yates in her celebrated monograph The Art of Memory. Artificially enhanced memory, a crucial skill for public speakers in Greek and Roman society, depended on two things: places and images. The practitioner of rhetoric learned to use buildings (real or imagined, but preferably monumental) to store discrete units of memory (distinct mental images or words) in retrievable order.

Visual art, unlike speaking or writing, allows (indeed usually demands) mental images to assume material form, to become objects. The memories recalled by such means tend to appear less artificial, more natural. To make her first Nest, Lehtonen used two sofas, a coffee table, rugs and blankets. In response to our invitation to participate in The art of, she has created Nest (reconstruction of a nest I wanted to build 6 years old) (2026). Certain elements that were off limits to her as an underage family member could now be used without restriction or sanction: precious books from the home library (and from her late mother’s second-hand bookshop in Tampere, Kulkukirja or ‘Stray Books’), two breakable flower vases, a particular table, a wicker chair. Some items had to be specially purchased to complete the mental image of what would have been, could have been.

Lehtonen speaks of the nest as a degree zero of architecture, a response to a deeply seated need for shelter, an instinct we share with many animals. The nests that children build within their own home environments (which hopefully are already safe spaces) also respond to general human behaviour in the face of disaster. People either escape inwards, to a padded cell of their own making, or flee to the big outdoors, where they anyway tend to put up a small tent.

Henrietta Lehtonen, Nest (Reconstruction of a nest I built 5 years old. At the age of 18 I started to study architecture), 1995
Henrietta Lehtonen, Nest (Reconstruction of a nest I built 5 years old. At the age of 18 I started to study architecture), 1995

Hedy Leung (Hong Kong/England, 1975) has come to visual art through the practice of contemporary experimental ikebana, based on the teachings of Sofu Teshigara’s Sogetsu School, founded in 1927, which strives for balance and proportion but also welcomes unconventional materials like metal, glass and plastic. Leung typically sources materials in the immediate surroundings of the venues she chooses for realising her installations, which are constructed around an inaugural moment before an audience, a real-time performance of sculptural thought and method.

In preparation for her participation in The art of she will spend a week exploring the Helsinki Wholesale Market, where Kohta is located. The large city-owned market is slated for future redevelopment, and this is one of Leung’s specific starting points for What Hands Give, What Ground Keeps (2026). The work is, she writes, ‘inspired by my experience of years of returning to wholesale flower markets in Hong Kong and, more recently, London. Over time, transactions become relationships, and some relationships become friendships. Flowers are set aside before they are discarded. People begin to recognise one another through repeated encounters. Presence within a shared space gradually creates familiarity, allowing relationships – and sometimes friendships – to take shape.’2

Yet Leung’s work focuses less on memoria and more the other two components of Cicero’s prudence, intelligentia and providentia. The openness to chance and interaction that is wired into the ikebana tradition, also in its classical incarnations, is grounded in foresight. A preference for the unknowable (but possibly foreseeable) also characterises Leung’s practice. Without sharing any history with the area and the people working in its shops and restaurants, she will scavenge for materials of various kinds, including cut flowers, and will encounters to happen within the physical and social space of the market. ‘I will gather materials through three kinds of encounter: what is given, what is discarded and what is refused. Each leaves a different trace.’3

The work interprets the exhibition theme through conscious action, but also through deliberate inaction. Under Leung’s calm but determined guidance, both turn out to be future-oriented. What Hands Give, What Ground Keeps will find its physical form during the opening performance on 5 August, when the obtained materials will be composed and then left ‘to dry, bend and change without my intervention’.4

glė Ridikaitė, Floor of the Great Synagogue of Vilnius (Thinking about Father), 2024–26. Photographed in her studio in Vilnius by Anders Kreuger, May 2026
Eglė Ridikaitė, Floor of the Great Synagogue of Vilnius (Thinking about Father), 2024–26. Photographed in her studio in Vilnius by Anders Kreuger, May 2026

Eglė Ridikaitė (Lithuania, 1966) is a celebrated painter working with large, usually unstretched canvases and a self-invented technique based on spray painting through stencils. She has, in a manner of speaking, taken it upon herself to translate the outside world into images that may be executed in this way. It is not that she allows her chosen painting method to decide which images shall be painted. Rather, by sticking to her cumbersome system for making painted images she is acknowledging that the art of painting must always employ transformation to arrive at trans-substantiation.

In recent years Ridikaitė, who is also a lecturer at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, has dedicated much of her practice to researching surviving late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century tiled floors in various buildings in central Vilnius. This summer, some of the these works, in sizes exactly matching those of the original rooms, can be seen in her solo exhibition Depositions in the eighteenth-century St. George’s church. A significant inclusion there are her painted replicas of the patterned terrazzo floor of the Great Synagogue. This was a seventeenth-century building of great religious and cultural significance, remodelled in the mid-eighteenth century by the Silesian-born architect Johann Christoph Glaubitz, who worked for all the confessions of what used to be a diverse and multilingual city.

The Great Synagogue of Vilna was damaged during the Second World War and its remains were demolished in the mid-1950s. Since synagogues could never be taller than churches the floor was dug out a few metres below the street level and had remained there, under the kindergarten that was built over the rubble. In the mid-2010s excavations of the floor started. Until the kindergarten was pulled down it was used as studios by a group of artists, among them Ridikaitė.

In our exhibition she is showing two series of paintings. Both are phantom images of what can no longer be seen on this particular site. Autoportetai (tarp paveikslų) (Self-Portraits (Among Pictures), 2024–25) depict the paint-stained and masking-tape-riddled walls of the former studio. These paintings are mounted on stretchers and displayed leaning against the gallery wall. There is also Didžiosios Vilniaus sinagogos grindys (Floor of the Great Synagogue of Vilna), a new triptych of large unstretched canvases with one-to-one renderings of fragments of the synagogue’s submerged terrazzo floor. The production period coincided with a series of personal losses, and Ridikaitė has also given them the individual titles Galvojant apie mamą (Thinking about Mother, 2024–26), Galvojant apie tėtį (Thinking about Father, 2024–26) and Galvojant apie tave (Thinking about You, 2025–26).