Matti Aikio

31.10.–17.11.2024

** Welcome to the opening on Wednesday 30.10. at 17–19 **

When the world is at war, climate change and species extinction are accelerating, racism against the Sámi is on the rise, and darkness is approaching, sometimes you just want to dream by the fireshore (while living in a goahti). In such moments, the artist may simply want to create something beautiful, warm, soft, and comforting – something you want to linger by, something that warms you.

Matti Aikio’s first solo exhibition in Helsinki.

BIO

Matti Aikio is a Sámi artist from the Finnish side of Sápmi. He comes from an academic reindeer herding family. He holds an MA in contemporary art from Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art. He works with mixed media, photography, sound, text, installations and often multi-channel video installations combining video with other media. He is interested in various topics that often are inspired by his indigenous background and indigenous perspective on the world. He has made artworks dealing with topics like the truth and reconciliation process of the Sámi people in the Nordic countries, fake indigenous identity and its relationship to cultural appropriation, indigenous aesthetics and the concept of fake and authentic in the context of indigenous material and immaterial property.

His main interest is looking into and trying to understand modern society’s relationship with nature. From an indigenous point of view this relationship can be seen as quite bizarre. At the background of this problematic, or schizophrenic relationship with nature lies a very fundamental problem – relating to nature as something external, something outside of the human world.

Aikio was one of the TBA21-Academy’s Ocean Fellows 2022 and Sámi Fellow at Vera List Center for Art and Politics 2022-2023.  His work has graced significant venues, including the Helsinki Biennial, Botkyrka Konsthall, Cairo Off Biennale, the Sápmi Triennale, the National Museum of Finland, and at a screening program of Tate Modern.