Featured Events in Helsinki in August 2025 (July Updated)

The 3rd Helsinki Biennial will present works by around 35 artists and art collectives at three different venues: Vallisaari Island, Esplanade Park and the Helsinki Art Museum. This year's Biennale is co-curated by Blanca de la Torre and Kati Kivinen. With the title "Refuge: Below and Beyond, Becoming and Belonging", the two main curators try to go beyond the human-centered perspective and focus on non-human roles such as plants, animals, fungi, chemical elements and minerals. And explore alternative ways of collecting and disseminating knowledge about the world. The theme of this Biennale is inspired by the natural habitat of the Rampart Island, whose rich ecosystem has been well preserved due to decades of inaccessibility. This undisturbed haven provides a rare opportunity for thinking - to imagine what happens when humans retreat behind the scenes and non-human actors take the lead.

Marjatta Tapiola often takes inspiration for her paintings from literature, from sources such as the Greek Minotaur myth or the work of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Rather than depicting these venerable literary sources literally, she uses them as a vehicle for dealing with themes such as the brutality of life and what it means to be human, exploring emotions, hopes and experiences familiar to everyone. The exhibition provides a review of Tapiola’s recent oil paintings and works on paper, this time drawing inspiration from selected extracts of poetry by the German-born writer W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) and Autobiography of Red (1998) by the Canadian novelist Anne Carson (b. 1950). Foremost among Tapiola’s sources of literary inspiration are the epic myths of Metamorphoses originally published in Latin by the Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE-18 CE). The classic magnum opus is said to contain almost everything ever written in subsequent literature.