A taste of Finland


Among the list of participants in this year’s Venice Biennale, one notices a strong Scandinavian presence. Among them, a Finnish group of artists, Maaria Wirkkala, Salla Tykkä, and Laura Horelli is particularly striking, both for their individual pieces, as well as for the overlapping themes that emerge in their work as a whole.

Of the three, Maaria Wirkkala is the most recognized and established. Many of her installations and projects could be termed Public Art, or art created for public space, as she often works on a grand scale, creating tableaux from the cityscape itself.

At the fifth Istanbul Biennale, she focused on the place where Europe and Asia actually meet, in the middle of the Bosporus on the island of Kiz Kules. Her means were modest: just some light, which illuminated the walls of an old lighthouse, called The Tower of Maidens. The title of the piece, Found a Mental Connection, stresses that the associations Wirkkala establishes in her work are in fact mental rather than material, opening a vista onto the imaginary, creating a tableau from the non-physical.

There is clearly a symbolic aspect to her work; in the Istanbul project, for example, she originally considered connecting the continents with a bridge of light extending from the beacon’s locale, or creating a protective, circular beam around the island. The bridge and the circle: both archetypal symbols…


The full text is published in "tema celeste" No. 86, Summer 2001.




Fred Andersson