This inchoate and potentially infinite list of words are intended as a ‘concept generator’ for the group exhibition The art of:

The exhibition’s three curators, all based in Helsinki, are Anders Kreuger (Sweden, 1965), Dr. Markus Lähteenmäki (Finland, 1988) and Dr. Mika Savela (Finland, 1978). Anders is a curator and writer specialising on contemporary visual art and the director of Kohta. Markus and Mika are historians, theoreticians and curators of architecture and visual art.

We share specific ideas about what an exhibition should look and feel like when it truly transgresses boundaries between these areas of activity, which for many reasons are often kept separate. We want to see an exhibition that doesn’t speak about crossover but actually makes it happen.

We have invited four artists who, in our understanding, have positioned themselves between various professional affiliations (fine arts, architecture, graphic design, flower arrangement) and furthermore between various artistic formats (painting, sculpture, installation, performance).

L’Esprit de l’escalier is a publishing project that has produced a diverse body of works across multiple formats and scales since 2012. The project engages both with archives of creative practice and the production of new work, often in dialogue with architecture.

Henrietta Lehtonen (Finland, 1965) was trained as an architect and emerged on the international art scene with the early part of the ‘relational aesthetics’ wave of the mid-1990s. Some of her works offer a hands-on interpretation of the term ‘memory palace’ (a mnemonic device from classical antiquity that allowed speakers to memorise discourse by conjuring it up as an internal visualisation of built space).

Hedy Leung (Hong Kong/England, 1975) has come to visual art through the practice of modern experimental ikebana. She sources material in the immediate surroundings of the venues she chooses for realising her installations, which double as real-time performances of sculptural thought. We invite her to work with the Helsinki Wholesale Market, where Kohta is located, as her material.

Eglė Ridikaitė (Lithuania, 1966) is a painter with a preference for large-scale unstretched canvases and techniques such as stencils and air-brushing. In recent years she has dedicated herself to researching floor tiles in various older buildings in Vilnius, notably what is known about the floor of the otherwise demolished Great Synagogue.