Forms of Presence: Proximities / Turku / 2.-18.10.
Exhibition 2.-18.10.2026. (opening 1.10.)
Wed-Fri 12-17, Sat-Sun 12-16
Performative weekend 2.-4.10.2026
Forms of Presence: Proximities
Forms of Presence: Proximities brings together a collection of works that examine how identities take shape through relations and encounters. The works in the group exhibition of the Professional Media Presence project explore forms of closeness and distance through different media, perspectives and scales. The artists explore how identity is constructed and shaped through relationships with other people, more-than-human beings, the environment, technology, movement, images, and the cycles of life and death. Throughout the works, presence emerges not as a singular condition but as a shifting landscape of connections, tensions, and mutual dependencies. The works and their interrelations unfold across the gallery space and extend beyond it.
Proximities: closeness, distance and togetherness
The works in the exhibition move across different scales of proximity. Some remain close to the body, unfolding through gesture and the performer’s movement. Others reach past the human altogether, creating ecologies that have their own distinct presence, and some stretch even further – to places impossible to physically reach, only comprehensible through mediated images. The exhibition thus presents different distances of encounter through which presence becomes possible.
From all of this emerges the question of framing: it is selective, constructed, and never neutral. Even the closest encounter is preceded by layers of preparation before meeting the viewer. The further away the idea is, the more layers of translation it might need. Or does it? Who sets the frame? As much as a body located close by can feel intimate, so an idea seemingly very distant, can seem direct and approachable.
Proximity, here, is not just spatial. It is relational, perceptual and embodied.
List of artwork
Meri Hietala: Pyytää / Fråga efter / To ask for
Peace ceremony (durational performance) and installation
Jenni Honkamaa: Syvänne II – Echo into the universe, the Dance of the living body to death
Installation and performance
Aino Karstinen: ja minusta kuultaa (and from me it gleams)
Performance; solo dance work
Tianjun Li: Free as birds: Migrating
Video installation
Kirsi-Marja Moberg:
Smoke signals 1
Mixed media
Untitled visual poem
Mixed media
Miradonna Sirkka: For your eyes only
Video installation
Tuulia Soininen: Tuoni
Video installation
Alexandra Stroganova:
Fluid identity
Cyanotype animation
We are all in this together, but we are not one and the same
Series of cyanotype prints
Leda Vaneva: Big beach
Installation with pencil and 3D drawings, video
Co-curated by Suvi Lehtinen, Kirsi-Marja Moberg, Anna Kuusela, Anni Sundbacka & Leda Vaneva.
Artists
Alexandra Stroganova (FI)
Artist, curator & art educator
Alexandra Stroganova (b. 1990) is a Helsinki-based transdisciplinary artist exploring the entanglements of nature and culture, human and more-than-human worlds. Informed by new materialism and hydrofeminism, her research-based practice engages material agency, care, and sustainability through analogue and alternative photography, video and installations. She holds an MA in Nordic Visual Studies and Art Education from Aalto University, with a minor in Visual Culture, Curating, and Contemporary Art. Her work has been exhibited in Finland and developed through international artist residencies.
IG: @xstrox
www.alexandrastroganova.com
Aino Karstinen (FI)
Dancer, teacher, choreographer
Aino Karstinen is a mover and facilitator—a dance artist and pedagogue. She is inspired by encounters, touch, and tensions between people. Her work often brings dance into communities and places where it is not usually seen. She is interested in dance that draws the audience close and turns movement into a shared experience. Her choreographic thinking grows from stories, characters, and moments when everyday life opens into something both familiar and new. Aino Karstinen seeks intimacy, playfulness, detail, flow, and physicality, often combining movement with text so that words and dance intertwine like poetry on stage. Her work engages with local identity, cultural heritage, and accessibility, creating meaningful experiences for diverse audiences. She aims to focus primarily on artistic work as a choreographer, guided by values of gentle pedagogy, dance education, and audience engagement.
IG: @ainokarstinen
https://ainokarstinen.com/artistic-work/
Jenni Honkamaa (FI)
Dance artist
Jenni Honkamaa is a dance artist from Vantaa, working across Finland in dance and performing arts. Her multidisciplinary practice combines dance, digital media, materials, and visual arts, often at the intersection of performance and installation. Grounded in a continuous exploration of humanity, her work seeks empathy and is guided by gentle values.
She works as a performer, choreographer, teacher, community artist, facilitator, producer, artistic lead of the Tiloissa concept, and leader of the contemporary dance group Välissä. She graduated as a dance teacher from Turku University of Applied Sciences (2019) and as a dancer from Outokumpu Dance Education (2021), with further studies in contemporary dance and choreography.
IG: @jennihonkamaa
https://jennihonkamaa-com.webnode.fi/
Kirsi-Marja Moberg (FI)
Visual artist & poet
Kirsi-Marja Moberg is a multimedia artist working in the fields of visual arts and poetry and exploring their intersections. She often works around the theme of melancholy and the unspeakable. Her techniques mainly involve scratchboard, painting and letterpress printing. In recent years Moberg has focused on asemic writing, and she refers to works within this theme as asemic poems. In addition to writing and stage poetry, Moberg´s practice expands to video poetry that integrates video art with poetic text and performance. Moberg holds an M.A from Aalto-University, Department of Art and Media.
Leda Vaneva (FI)
Visual artist
Leda Vaneva is a Helsinki-based artist. Vaneva explores the processes of construction in the observable world, human perceptions and their limitations. Vanevas pieces revolve around themes like materiality, identity, the connection of the digital and physical realm, hybridity. Leda Vaneva holds MA degrees in New Media (Aalto University, FI) and Photography (National Academy of Art, BG). Vanevas work has been exhibited at a number of venues, like the Bulgaria’s National gallery, the National Palace of Culture, Sofia City gallery, Sofia Arsenal Museum of Contemporary Art, HAM Gallery, Kaapelitehdas, and Lapinlahti Gallery in Helsinki, Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg/Vienna, Projektraum Galerie M in Berlin, as well as exhibition spaces in Hong Kong, Barcelona, Eindhoven, Seoul.
IG: @ledavaneva
https://ledavaneva.com
Meri Hietala (FI)
Multidisciplinary artist & art educator
Meri Hietala (TaM) works as a freelance visual artist and works multidisciplinary with performance art and environmental, installation, sound and video art. The focus of Hietala’s art is the study of environmental phenomena and elements, animism and rituals, dreams and sound using bodily methods. He also studies traditional craft methods and materials, bringing them experimentally into his artworks. Hietala’s art has been exhibited since 2007 in Europe, Australia, America and most recently in West Africa.
IG: @rime_c7
www.merihietala.net
Miradonna Sirkka (FI)
Performance & contemporary circus artist
Miradonna Sirkka is a contemporary circus and performance artist, director and performer based in Helsinki. Her art works are multidisciplinary blends of performance art, video, sound and media art. Inspiration arises from pleasure, emotions that are too big to handle, disgusting and top secret thoughts, human contact and everyday awkwardness. Every detail is thought through too many times and then dipped into a sugar bowl and digged out gruesomely realistic. Plasticity, pine forest, femmeness and grittiness all feature in the works. Miradonna graduated as a circus artist from Turku University of Applied Sciences and as a Master of Arts from Aalto University (ViCCa). Miradonna is the founder and co-Artistic Director of Recover Laboratory, a multi-disciplinary art collective.
IG: @miradonnasirkka / @recoverlaboratory
https://miradonnasirkka.com/
Tianjun Li (FI)
Visual artist, sound artist
Tianjun Li (CN/FI, 1999), also known as Timjune, is a Finland-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice integrates lens-based media and the human vocal tract. Working with an expansive four-octave vocal range and synesthetic translation, the biological body functions as a trans-species acoustic interface. Li holds a Master of Arts in Visual Cultures, Curating, and Contemporary Art, with a minor in Sound in New Media, from Aalto University.
Li’s artistic work has been supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Saastamoinen Foundation, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, and Espoo Artist Grant, and they have been awarded residencies and fellowships, including Kone Foundation’s Saari Residence (FI) and Nordic Culture Point’s B28 Residence (FI). Their works have been exhibited and performed internationally, and their upcoming solo exhibition will be held at Forum Box (FI) in 2026.
IG: @timjunelee
https://timjune.com/
Tuulia Soininen (FI)
Dance & video artist
Tuulia Soininen is a dance and video artist from Orivesi, Finland. She works at the intersection of political art, feminism, and ethical practices. She holds a BA (Hons) in Dance and Choreography from Falmouth University in England, and a Master’s in Choreography from Codarts and Fontys in the Netherlands. She is a multiple award-winning dance filmmaker, and her films have toured in over 20 countries. Tuulia is an emerging freelance artist and known as a bold yet gentle feministic artistic voice, unafraid to take a stand.
IG: @tuuliasoi
https://www.tuuliasoininen.com/
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