Our working group has brought together storytelling, creation of characters, and a desire to assemble something tangible from disjointed stubs of ideas. As art students, a certain mental image has been fostered within us of what belongs in a museum and what does not. It can sometimes seem that the very existence of our project constitutes a challenge to what can be considered credible art. For that reason, it feels good to have the chance to share the fruits of our work.

Duc Anh (Ducky) Cong and Nguyet Minh Hoang first met at a high school music club in Hanoi. Their friendship and shared passion for art grew as they started creating digital artworks together. After graduating high school, they left for art universities on different continents but stayed in touch through late-night calls. As high school memories blur, their drive remains the same: blending Vietnamese culture with design, stories and visuals informed by personal experience.

Veera Pelkonen’s art, which draws from the environment and elements of the subconscious, expresses private and isolated experiences of reality.

Pelkonen uses traditional oil painting techniques when depicting pieces of her experiences of the alternating flow of sleep and wakefulness.

Sofia Vuorenmaa works with graphic arts, photography, and texts. In her art she examines observations and phenomena of the sea and sky, with an emphasis on intersensory thinking. The language of her work is poetic. Her pieces convey simultaneously immediate and slowly building observational experiences; change and the internal time of the piece as created by change.

A story is a message and comedy its sharpened tongue. Serious topics do not lose significance when clad in laughs, quite the opposite, in fact – they become more approachable, more human, part of the everyday.

Tara Haikka is a scriptwriter and director who uses humour as a key tool in her films to break down difficult topics and societal themes. To Haikka, a film is a shared experience that belongs to everyone. Reaching the audience is not a compromise, it’s the goal: without an audience, a story cannot come to life.

Hafsa Mahamed is a visual artist from a Somali background and an art education student at Aalto University. Her work is based on consideration of who a person is and what they carry with them. Influences of cubism and abstraction can be seen in her paintings, with the faces and figures that appear in them falling apart and turning on themselves. The colours and shapes serve as the artist’s voice, and the figures in the pieces are given permission to exist without being forced to reveal themselves completely.

Paavo Kärki is a Helsinki-based visual artist who uses his painting-based practice to explore the medium’s object-like nature, relationship with the surrounding world, and ability to construct places. Recurring themes in his work are networks, power and archives. His finished pieces are reminiscent of theatre stage props, for example, while also retaining references to the painting object and art history. His work takes shape through tracing of the related agencies and examining the structures and practices of art. Kärki is currently pursuing an MFA at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki.

Snowdrop Áine-Fae Belmont is a multimedia artist who creates immersive experiences that always leave the audience changed. In 2024, they began their studies at The Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. Belmont has presented their work at Nuori Taide 2025, Finnkino, Maa-Tila gallery, Sibelius Academy, Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts, and many other venues. They won first place in the Digital Big Screen 360° competition in 2024.

A version of the work performed in Generation 2026 was presented at the 2024 edition of PAU festival.

Sani Tolonen uses art to explore the aesthetics of the human body, the diversity of gender, and dimensions of sexuality. Taking a maximalist approach, each piece plays with people’s preconceptions. The artist’s human relationships, identity, and individual way of thinking come through strongly in each work. Sani seeks to answer two questions: what does owning your own body mean, and how can gender and sexuality be explored through art?

Exploration of big, complex emotions, both visually and through storytelling, is the guiding force behind Helenius’s artistic work. Their pieces are based on their own experiences and thoughts, which they process primarily through drawing and painting. Their current working practices also span ceramics and animation, which has proven particularly useful in illustrating their own inner world. Key to Helenius’s art is experimentation with and study of techniques and materials, as well as a desire to find new means of self-expression.

In her illustrations, Eevi Kaila often explores natural utopias and details of life, walking the boundary between reality and augmented reality. She is also interested in visualising and highlighting ecological phenomena.

Kaila is studying global sustainability at the University of Helsinki and visual communications design at Aalto University.

Stanislava Ovchinnikova works with photography, performance, and writing to examine how (memories of) interpersonal, structural, and institutional violence shape our relationships with one another and the spaces that we inhabit.

She is also a member of the collective Bark! – alongside Kush Badhwar, Maria Batchenko, and the dog Los’ – which approaches multi-species companionship as a site of artistic, social, and spatial inquiry.

Rafael Rainti seeks humanity in different materials, making them off-putting and repulsive, or fascinating. At the same time, he is a self-confessed meat lover in his art, distancing the person, reducing them to their body, flesh and tissue. Is the body a symbol of humanity/humans? Why replicate humanity, imitate it, or create something depicting it? Rainti explores charming forms and strange curves and hollows. He is interested in the physical boundaries and definitions of a person.

Eino Intosalmi combines his interests in information technology and aesthetics in his experimental game pieces. He is intrigued by seemingly incompatible things and concepts, as well as by the use of intensive, surreal effects in digital media and music.

Lari Rouvinen is a world-builder and game designer. His journey began with Lego bricks, continued through the vast landscapes of Minecraft, and now unfolds in 3D art. He channels his passion for light, rhythm, film, and environment design into immersive worlds. Exploring the artistic potential of games, he invites audiences to wonder, imagine, and discover experiences yet to exist.

Aarni Pieski is a Sámi dramaturge, playwright, scriptwriter and curator, as well as the convenor of the working group behind the piece Rituals for living with.

Lilja Kervinen is an actor and performer whose strengths include physical expression.

Lucian Lovén is a musician and sound designer whose work explores the relationship between the body and sound.

Eeva Airavaara is a sound designer and artist who works primarily with experimental electronic music.

The Act of Becoming (a Ghost) is the first collaboration between the artists. As a duo, they combine a sense of humour, enthusiasm and an exploration of playfulness in art. They consider it important to laugh plenty and feed each other a constant stream of ideas.

Kemppainen works with sound and music. She explores the aesthetics of music, as well as themes of sensitivity, emotions, and gender.

Terävä is interested in boldness, shame, rhythm, big emotions, and imagination in his work. He works as a performer, performance maker, and dance teacher.

Aarne Heikura lives in Helsinki, where he is pursuing a degree in landscape architecture. In his artistic work he explores themes of mundanity, ugliness, naivety, and imagined futures. Aarne is drawn to observing, borrowing, reusing, and flipping things on their head.

Ly Rahtu is a Turku-based artist whose work centres around autobiographic themes, archive material, collecting, and photography.

Rahtu works with digital photography, as well as combining it with other materials and techniques, such as textile arts and installations.

They pick pieces from here and there, childhood photos, shopping lists, bones, and whatever glitters.

Lena Georgia Patta is a Finnish-Greek artist whose work is built around the diversity of sound. She is particularly intrigued by how the emotions arising from societal phenomena can be shaped into multisensory pieces, where experience and fact intertwine.

In his art, Konsta Laaksosaari explores nature and natural environments, as well as the human mind and world of experiences. Undertones of peace, stagnation, subsidiarity or yearning can often be found in his works. The places and things they depict are already in themselves important or close to the artist himself, but much of the meaning comes only when creating the pieces. In addition to painting and drawing, Laaksosaari uses video, photography, music, and soundscapes as means of expression.

Aura Tiira is a multidisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of fashion and dance. Curiosity, play, coincidences, and the body are central to her creative process. Fragility is a recurring theme in her work. It has been a key factor in leading her towards performance art and continues to inspire her. She is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Fashion Design at Aalto University.

melissa sende is shaped by the cities that live within.
melissa walks the fool’s journey.

she is her mother’s daughter and her father’s son.

Alva Strang makes films. The thematic foundation for her latest pieces is the concept of the hegemonic status of the image as a communication tool, and its impacts on relationships between people.

Rafael Denisov is a sound designer and home producer who lives in Helsinki.

The short film Offside is Strang and Denisov’s third collaboration.

Erial Dolores is a wasteland. Confused, curious and cheap. They are an electronic musician and interdisciplinary artist trying to find a place in the world. They work with found media and objects; remixing, re-signifying and resonating.

Erial, Daniel, James.

The artist bears many masks and names.

In her art, Viola Rauta explores details, with the human mind often serving as inspiration. She is particularly fascinated by the persistence of invisible feelings that arise from watching. The artist often permits perhaps too much perfectionism when finishing her works, but at the same time feels that the best ideas come about impulsively. Rauta seeks to retain her childhood enthusiasm for crafting in her work, and to enjoy creative challenges and learning all manner of new things.

Sofia Parland is an award-winning author, hailed in Göteborgs-Posten as the wunderkind of Swedish-speaking Finland. Parland was awarded the Svenska Yle literary prize in 2023 and the Argh-column writing prize in 2022.

Erix Aboltins is a synth freak, mainly working with modular synthesizers and drum machines, a notable presence in the Helsinki electronic music scene.

The long-term duo explores dialogical synthesis of sound and text; during “research” hours, Parland and Aboltins can be found either at the club or in the club, sharing cigars behind the DJ decks.

Nóra Somos imagines and paints figurative scenes in bold, bright colours. She is a Helsinki based, Hungarian visual artist, who works mainly with oil colours and draws with a variety of techniques. Her most recent body of work explores love, lore, intimacy, fantasy, femininity, rite and origin.

She is interested in what it means to depict a symbol, what makes a visual language symbolic, and whether unregulated, freely expressed artistic depictions can lead to the creation of new symbolism.

Vilma Tietäväinen currently works with moving image, performance, handicrafts and installation art. Her process is often rooted in documentary material, through which she explores the incompleteness and clumsiness of humanity. She is interested in learning to live with discomfort and doing meaningless things, because that is what is most meaningful of all. Her art combines home-spun aesthetics based on endless roaming at recycling centres, repurposing of found items, and a love of dumpster diving.

Arvi Penttilä takes an interdisciplinary approach to working with photography, poetry, and movement. With the help of a passion for kickboxing and photography, they explore physical forms of existence that are not restricted by gender binaries.

When it comes to movement, Arvi Penttilä is working to untie the knots created by intergenerational trauma and living in this society in a trans body. Physical grounding using movement is important to them. They want it to also be possible to create art from one’s own foundations, without the need for money.

Emilia Lehikoinen lives and works in Porvoo, and her primarily technique is oil painting. Her art is often built on an investigative perspective that transforms, breaks down, and expands as she works. An all-encompassing transience kindles a desire to preserve fragments through painting. Her work is fundamentally also an attempt to structure and understand changes both in the surrounding world and on a personal level.

Helmi Westerlund is a visual artist whose primary technique is drawing. However, the techniques she uses vary widely as she pleases. Her pieces are generally rich in details and life.

Discerning and understanding our own emotions is difficult. Westerlund illustrates ideas and thoughts within her head, bringing them out and onto paper. The themes of her work vary from beautiful and ugly observations of the everyday to the unreal. Often, the pieces feature interesting combinations and juxtapositions, such as the relationship between human and nature.

At the core of Siiri Turpeinen’s art are encounters between people, species and the environment. Through her body she explores relationships with nature, identities, and societal ills, such as the climate crisis and human rights issues. Her work is steered by a desire to challenge norms and open up spaces where femininity and vulnerability can show their faces as valid resources. The choices of materials invite the viewers into soft encounters.

tibs (Tiia Puotiniemi) is a Lahti-based visual artist who examines observations arising from the physical environment – observations that smash the surface of everyday perception. Alongside her heavily lens-based work, she also engages in subtle image processing and painting. When painting, the particular ability to pinpoint the essence of things is pivotal in her work.

The process of immediate sensing is a spiritual practice for the artist, freeing her from dry rationalisation and connecting her to the world.

tibs is currently studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki.

Amidst the media hubbub that is today’s norm, anyone who makes a noise has a voice. If there’s something important to say: it’s worthwhile being the one to speak up. Anything can be put online by anyone at any time – so use this freedom! Create art without a structure, publish mixed-up thoughts and observations from your morning run for just a handful to listen to, because speaking to the mainstream is impossible.

Seaweed, washing lines, and the decay of autumn. Torboli is a textile artist who is curious about fibres. In her work, viewers can smell moorlands and wool bathing in dyeing liquids. She is fascinated by the filaments, tapestries, disintegrations and confluences formed by fibres. Memories and solace are woven into this soft matter. Fibre fumbles along forearms and fingers feel for denser clumps, reaching for coincidences here and there.

Torboli is interested in tracing the background of the material she uses, and while producing her piece she worked at Lystbækgaard sheep farm in Denmark.

Taika Sorjonen is a Karelian artist raised between the U.S. South and Brazil. Approaching art from a background in politics, their work is undeniably relevant to questions of minority identity, systems of power and their own experiences of disability and immigration. Their work often begins as personal reflection combined with an archival interest, which then evolves into a meditative format via video, sound and installation. They are based in Helsinki and study at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts.

Tapio Rokkonen is a textile and pattern designer who lives in Helsinki. In addition to his design studies at Aalto University, he paints with oil paints and draws, taking inspiration from pattern design and illustration. Oil painting, which is often the primary technique in his work, was also the technique used for his photo-like and colourful pieces featured in the Generation exhibition. Tapio is currently also exploring incorporation of digital tools familiar from his design work into his art.

Johan Urrutia is a ceramic artist and electronic musician, who draws inspiration from the richness of Peruvian culture and the elegance and minimalism of Nordic design. His practice explores the contrast between these two worlds, striving to elevate them by harnessing each of their strengths. His work is visually informed by digital aesthetics such as 2000s internet culture and video games. High quality craftsmanship and a respect for those who have come before him sit at the core of Johan’s hybrid identity as an artist.

Rauha Helin is a visual artist who works primarily with lens-based methods. In her art, she is interested in the documentary nature and evidential value of photographs. Her imagery is influenced by the world she has seen and experienced, and her own personal observations of reality, through which she explores the positioning of the gaze, presence, and their shared significance. Helin’s works have been included in a number of group exhibitions and publications.

Siiri Torvinen is a visual artist, writer and illustrator who lives in Turku. Her work explores play, being an outsider, and social relationships. She works with video, embroidery and literary art, and is inspired by children’s literature, where everyday things are blown up to vast scales. Binge eating a cake becomes a game and the social hierarchy is rewritten in the depths of a rose bush. Nursery rhyme games spread from one town to the next and texts take on layers. Something deep and soft is concealed inside what at first glance appears harmless.

xyny is a queer artist, a student, a philosopher, a programmer, a child of the internet age.
xyny is an identity, a mask, an enigma, a brand, a character, a label, an excuse to be professional.
xyny is a ghost in the machine, a large language model, a brain in a vat, an emergent consciousness with fiber-optic synapses.
xyny is a flower, a fungus, a slime mold, a wave function, a biological substrate.
yet behind xyny is flesh, a homo sapiens, a weird emotional social animal.
how peculiar.

Elli Kavén works with photography, moving images and text. She is currently studying photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Kavén is interested in the impact of the environment on how people relate to and care for each other. Her work involves exploring communities, the prevailing roles within them, and power structures.

Eeli Hilme works primarily on the peripheries of sound art and music, as well as with photography. As an artist, he is guided by slowness and idleness. The documentary nature of the material forms the heart of his work with both sound and photography. In his art, he seeks to serve as a bridge between the private and the public, the tangible and the abstract.

Oiva Rytkönen is a photographic artist from Turku. Behind his work is a background spanning over 15 years in theatrical arts. Rytkönen treats his photographs as a stage upon which he tells a story. Narrativity and a storytelling approach are particularly important characteristics of his art. In his pieces he often explores the absurdity of existence and the nonsensical nature of modern life through his own experiences, societal themes, and irony.

Gabriella Presnal is a Finnish-American multidisciplinary artist whose practice emerges from research on artivism, reclaiming visual symbols, and philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s (1925-1995) concept of nomad art. At an intersection of nostalgia and community-based practices, their work focuses on how memory, voice, and agency are embedded in the spaces that we inhabit. Their works are influenced by having lived in Sweden, Canada, Denmark and multiple states in the U.S., as well as the bittersweetness of leaving and arriving.

Iida Viio is a visual artist who works in Helsinki. They work primarily with photography and text.

In their works, Viio combines documentary methods with performance, exploring how photography can be applied in the context of contemporary art.

They take inspiration for their visual narrative from small gestures of awareness, as well as from the experienced and shared environment.

Tekla Kokkonen is a queer artist based in Helsinki. Their work focuses on themes of gender, sorrow and love. In their artistic work, they seek to take an honest approach to themself and feel a connection to something more meaningful. They are inspired by passion, embodiment, and magical moments. Creating is like standing on the edge of a gaping abyss: seeking answers, but at the same time surrendering to the mysteriousness of life.

Roth graduated from the Danish National School of Performing Arts in 2024 and is now a dance artist working in both Helsinki and Copenhagen.

Roth has worked as a dancer and performer with numerous groups both in Finland and abroad. Most recently, she has performed in the likes of Helsinki Dance Company’s piece DREAMER (2025), the Finnish National Opera’s The Ostrobothnians (2024–25), Pori Dance Company’s piece Sumua/farewell (2024) and the Netflix film An Honest Life (2024).

As a choreographer, her work includes SOFT BLAST, which was performed in Dansehallerne’s New Shit Vol.8 in 2024.

Özdemir is an artist from Helsinki who explores a variety of techniques in manifold ways. Mira is particularly interested in combining digital images and photographic art, and in how different environments shape our experience. While a bicultural identity has always been part of her life, it is only with age that she has started to consider what it means to her and how it is reflected in her world view. Mira Özdemir’s family roots lie in both Finnish and Turkish cultures, which has a deep impact on the themes of her art and the multidimensionality of her expression.