The Other Side of the Mountain

Karl Ohiri (b. 1983) is a British-Nigerian visual artist based in Helsinki. Alongside his practice, Ohiri is the founder of Lagos Studio Archives, a project that collects, preserves, and presents the archives of a generation of Nigerian film photographers.

Ohiri’s practice draws on his background in visual culture and explores the human condition and lived experience through photography, text, video and everyday objects. The works on display at Amos Rex are part of Dear Mum, a body of work that explores love, loss and coming to terms with the death of his mother.

Photo: Riikka Kassinen

Akinbode Akinbiyi is a Nigerian-British photographer, writer and curator. His career as a self-taught photographer began in the mid-1970s.

Working with film photography, Akinbiyi explores cities and the changes they undergo over time. Akinbiyi’s practice is guided by the principle “I wonder as I wander”, a phrase inspired by Langston Hughes’s autobiography of the same name.

The exhibition presents 36 large-scale black-and-white photographs depicting street scenes from three African megacities: Bamako, Lagos and Johannesburg.

Photo: Stefanie Kulisch

Jeannette Ehlers (b. 1973) is a Trinidadian-Danish artist. Her work explores the histories of colonialism, race and memory.

Ehlers is known for works that challenge viewers to confront Denmark’s colonial history and its role in the slave trade, while highlighting the possibility of empowerment and healing.

Two of her works are on display at Amos Rex, including the neon artwork Until the Lion, which is presented in the museum window. The work originated in Ghana, where Ehlers visited slave forts built by Danish colonists.

Photo: Roar Studio Milano

Sandra Mujinga (b. 1989) is a Norwegian artist, DJ and musician born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Inspired by science fiction and Afrofuturism, Mujinga explores different forms of visibility and invisibility. In the installation Skin to Skin, the space is filled with 55 sculptural figures, as if a single body had been multiplied.

As she develops her work, Mujinga often experiments with how materials appear on camera. This connects to one of her central themes: surveillance and how we are watched, recorded and interpreted.

Photo: Chai Saeidi

Loulou Cherinet (b. 1970) is a Swedish artist of Ethiopian heritage and a professor of fine art who moves between Stockholm and Addis Ababa.

Cherinet works with photography, video, painting and installation. Her work explores how politics shapes the spaces we live in, and how highly planned urban environments can overlook people’s needs.

For her new work at Amos Rex, Cherinet cycled around Helsinki, observing the city’s emerging neighbourhoods. Scapeland brings together painted views of areas including Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari.

Photo: Mattias Lindbäck

Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987) is known for installations that can cover entire buildings.

For Amos Rex, he has created three new works. One of them covers the museum staircase: Mahama wanted visitors to walk through the work and experience it with their whole bodies. Mahama works with found materials: textiles, rubber waste from a Ghanaian tyre factory and metal seals from cocoa sacks reflect capitalist systems that exploit natural resources, as well as the movement of people and goods.

Photo: Carlos Idun-Tawiah. Courtesy of the artist, APALAZZOGALLERY and White Cube.

South African artist Lungiswa Gqunta (b. 1990) works across performance, printmaking, sculpture and installation. Her work is often multisensory and explores land: who it belongs to, who is excluded from it, and the traces left by the violence of colonialism and apartheid.

In Sleeping Pools – Brewing, the work fills the air with the smell of petrol. The scent refers to a homemade petrol bomb, a weapon used in protests. Gqunta invites us to reconsider land as a place of resistance, memory and transformation.

Photo: Warren Talmarkes

Emeka Ogboh (b. 1977) is a Nigerian sound and installation artist who works between Lagos and Berlin. His multisensory works explore globalisation, postcolonial histories and encounters.

The exhibition features two new works. Transmissions centres on a yellow Danfo bus that Ogboh drove across Northern Europe to Finland, while the dinner event Migratory Notes – Helsinki Edition explores migration, memory and belonging through taste. Many of Ogboh’s works are grounded in dialogue, whether between people, cities or the ingredients of gin.

Photo: Nti

Igshaan Adams (b. 1982) is a South African artist whose practice spans performance, weaving, sculpture and installation. The exhibition features works rooted in Adams’s childhood in Cape Town during the final years of apartheid.

Adams uses satellite images of his childhood neighbourhood to create woven works that act like maps, tracing shortcuts between neighbouring communities. These paths emerged as people crossed boundaries imposed by the apartheid regime.

Adams’s work questions where racial, sexual and religious boundaries are drawn, and who draws them.

Photo: Mario Todeschini

Adji Dieye (b. 1991) is a visual artist who works between Zurich, Milan and Dakar. Her work often begins with archives, public images and spaces.

Dieye explores how memory is constructed, transmitted and made visible in space. The video work Aphasia draws on Dieye’s research at Senegal’s National Iconographic Archives and the urban landscape of Dakar. Aphasia is a condition that affects the ability to produce and understand speech. Dieye uses the term to describe the difficulty of articulating certain histories, memories and inherited spaces.

Photo: Emmanuel Yoro

Liisa-Irmelen Liwata (b. 1998) is a Finnish-Congolese artist based in Helsinki. She works with sculpture, installation, writing and video.

Liwata is interested in the connections between the body, land and language. The exhibition features three installations and one video work. Oloseutu is an evolving installation, and the version presented here is its third and largest iteration. Materials such as clay, sand and glass are central to Liwata’s practice. They highlight the cycles of life, and how we return to the earth and become part of new landscapes.

Photo: Ronya Hirsma