Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma has reopened two years after being forced to close due to pandemic restrictions, with a fully restored interior and a vast show that spans the building’s five floors. In a wide-ranging show that will run until Oct. 16, 2022, “ARS22 — Living Encounters” brings together modern visual art, performances, and videos from local and international artists.
The Ateneum museum in Helsinki hosted the inaugural ARS, a series of significant international contemporary art exhibitions, in 1961. ARS22 is the 14th show in the series and the tenth to take place in the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. More than a million people visited the exhibitions, which featured work by around 600 artists or organizations.
The gallery has tackled key topics around the world since its inception 61 years ago, and this year’s edition continues that legacy. Work by 55 artists from 26 countries, including Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, and Mexico, explore the exhibition’s themes of cohabitation, our relationship with the earth, and the difficulties facing the planet and humanity, in addition to 15 commissions created particularly for the show.
Kholod Hawash, a self-taught textile artist from Iraq; Farah Al-Qasimi, an Emirati visual artist; Michael Rakowitz, an Iraqi-American multidisciplinary artist; and Slavs and Tatars, a collective of unnamed artists founded in 2006 by a Polish-Iranian duo, were among the artists invited to participate in ARS22.
“It’s always fantastic to be able to display work in new situations,” Al-Qasimi said in an interview. The interactions that survey exhibits propose between artists who operate in diverse ways are interesting.”
The Abu Dhabi-born photographer is also recognised for her brightly coloured pictures, which are on display on the museum’s second level. Her intriguing photographs highlighting materialism and gender interactions in the UAE have earned her the NADA Artadia Prize. “The work in the exhibition is part of my research on contemporary culture’s concepts of paradise, particularly in religion and the leisure and entertainment industries,” she explained.
She also incorporates figures of goats, fish, birds, and horses into her embroidered work, drawing inspiration from Iraqi folklore.
Indeed, the Arab world produces an unending supply of smart and thought-provoking works, and it is past time that specific rooms be created for them.