Current Works

Dialogues/What Passes Between

Meeting of funded project. April 4th.

From the series “Right under my nose”

Teaching a creative coding course. January 19th

From the series “Right under my nose”

Teachers meeting. February 7th.

From the series “Right under my nose”

Faculty meeting. November 11th.

From the series “Right under my nose”

Right under my nose is a series of prints from a software that follows the position of my nose during online meetings and distance teaching.

prompts for futures

A website for creating alternative takes on futures.

prompts for futures

A website for creating alternative takes on futures.

prompts for futures

A website for creating alternative takes on futures.

prompts for futures

A website for creating alternative takes on futures.

BEER AS MATERIAL AND LANDSCAPE

I like beer. I am not alone – around 177.5 million kiloliters of beer are consumed worldwide each year. In Finland, the average annual consumption is approximately 72 litres per person – a considerable amount, yet only half of the impressive 184 litres per capita consumed in the Czech Republic.

Beer is one of humanity’s oldest beverages, with a history stretching back thousands of years. The word “beer” derives from Germanic languages (bier, birra) and is connected to the Latin verb bibere, meaning “to drink.” In ancient Egypt, beer was offered to the gods, and today it is enjoyed from Svalbard to New Zealand.

Beer has played a role in sparking new sciences and innovations such as refrigeration, pasteurisation, and microbiology. It is woven into politics and culture – by some accounts, it may even have been the very driving force behind human civilisation itself.

But what is beer?

In this exhibition, beer reveals itself as an artistic material. Paintings on canvas are created with beer itself – stout, saison, pilsner, IPA, and Kveik each take shape as their own unique material and landscape.

The exhibition is also a process: during its course, new beer paintings will be created in front of the audience. Visitors are invited to witness the making of these works and to discuss the meanings carried by different beers.

Dialogues/What Passes Between- Exhibition press release

Dialogue brings together two distinct artistic sensibilities in a shared, almost black-and-white world of drawing. In this exhibition, Finnish artists Matti Vainio and Tomi Slotte Dufva enter into a conversation that is both playful and serious about the perceived systems we live inside and the state of the world we are trying to make sense of.

At the heart of the exhibition is a set of large, stubborn questions: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be? And more quietly: How is anything the way it is? Rather than offering clear answers, the works cultivate attention—toward uncertainty, toward structure, toward the ways our thinking is shaped by the images we consume and the stories we tell ourselves.

The exhibition also turns its gaze toward drawing itself. What does an image represent—or could an image exist without representing anything at all? Or what lies in “representing”? If a picture “depicts” nothing, does it still carry value? How does an image awaken a feeling or a thought without illustrating a message? Dialogue explores these tensions between meaning and silence, description and suggestion, statement and interruption.

Vainio and Slotte Dufva meet in contrast. Virtuosic, highly skilled craftsmanship encounters a more conceptual and minimal approach. Yet the two artists speak, unmistakably, about the same things. Their different visual languages become a tool for examining how images operate—how they influence perception, how they frame ideas, and how, sometimes, they can move us precisely when they refuse to explain themselves.