27.9. – 26.10.2025

Warmly welcome to the vernissage of Destina by Venla Helenius on 26.9.2025 at 6 – 9 PM
The video work will be screened twice at the opening, at 6:30 PM and 8:00 PM.

Venla Helenius’s new video work Destina takes as its starting point the femme-enfant figures painted by surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning in the 1940s and 1950s – figures that once rebelled against their prescribed role in art history, celebrating their unruly potential and creating autonomous surreal realities within domestic-like spaces. Developed through a six-month workshop period with the work’s six young performers, the work has emerged from a process in which the group interpreted the secrets and latent desires of Tanning’s paintings, and constructed scenes through these interpretations.

Venla Helenius (b. 1989, she/her) is a visual artist and photographer based in Helsinki and partly in Berlin. She holds an MFA in Time and Space Art from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, and an MA in Art Education from Aalto University. Helenius works with photography and video both independently and within multidisciplinary collaborations. Her recent practice has focused on feminist readings of art-historical continuities, on making room for quiet gestures and desires, and on the ambivalent pull of pathos.