Cover art: Vidha Saumya, To all the barricades… the rumour got you, 2024. Pavilion of Finland at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2024. Photo: Ugo Carmeni / Frame Contemporary Art Finland
Part I of this article, focusing on the Finland Pavilion on the Venice Biennale is in the Interviews and Reviews section of this issue
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Image 1. Vidha Saumya, To all the barricades… the rumour got you, 2024. Pavilion of Finland at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2024. Photo: Ugo Carmeni / Frame Contemporary Art Finland.
Image 2. Exhibition view of The pleasures we choose, Pavilion of Finland at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2024. Photo: Ugo Carmeni / Frame Contemporary Art Finland.
Image 3. The Alvar Aalto Pavilion of Finland. Photo by Ugo Carmeni. Courtesy Frame Contemporary Art Finland.
The Pavilion of Finland at the Biennale Arte 2024 is commissioned by Frame Contemporary Art Finland, 20 April – 24 November 2024, frame finland.fi.
Part I of this article, focusing on the Finland Pavilion on the Venice Biennale is in the Interviews and Reviews section of this issue.
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Camilla Boemio: How can we celebrate the pleasure of the personal as a powerful means of reimagining the world as we know it? Which materials and processes have you used to realize these cosmologies?
Pia Lindman: It is inspiring to suggest that this celebration and reimagining might pave the way to cosmologies. We humans need to create new cosmologies that help facilitate resilience, repair, and reconstruction as we face changing planetary conditions. But I believe that to build a cosmology, a belief system that holds the whole world together, there must be multiple imaginations woven together: a tapestry of non-human, more-than-human, universal as well as personal impulses. It is no longer sufficient to limit collectivity – a forceful formation of agency – to humans, persons, alone. And we as humans, no longer can expect to be the single ones to engender these collective forces or that energy. We must start to view ourselves as porous entities, clouds of affects, gasses, salts, minerals, and organic entities – simply part of larger clouds of energy. To enact upon the world one’s personal will becomes part of a process similar to the decision making of a swarm of bees. What is needed is the willingness to come together and find the mutual energy and pleasure with which life can be formed and supported. I am not presenting you with this model of a swarm in hopes that we could give up our responsibility as thinking, moral beings. Nor does it mean we no longer would keep our own personal (porous) borders nor act on our own desires. Each of the artists in this exhibition has created and realised their own visions with passion. The energy we share as a swarm is something you experience in the intertwined wholesomeness-and-diversity of the space. It is the air you feel and breathe, it is in the light, and in and between the words, objects, railings, and screens. And just like the artists carry their own intentions, passions, and intellect, as part of the common energy, so does the audience.
Collectivity, to exercise it as a swarm is to release control, play, and recompose life. Everyday actions reconstitute the collectivity again and again: healing, sharing, building, dancing, making pile-ups, arguing, gardening, living with and fostering microbes and other organisms.
Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen: In the world of prejudices and misconceptions, it´s already radical if a disabled person sings: “I feel good” or claims that life in one’s own peculiar body is pleasurable. My passion is to prove the world that living with piquant impairments is often fun. I use performance, film, sculpting and textiles as the practices.
Vidha Saumya: Pleasure is fundamental to one’s constitution or mental makeup, allowing a meandering and the capacity to recognise one’s political, intellectual, and ethical dedications. We are bound to come across others on a similar journey, whether they call it pleasure or not, and our voices will resonate. Pleasure compels us to probe, question, and create mischief, which facilitates a reimagining of the world as we know it. Through the mediums of my artistic practice – such as drawing, embroidery, and making objects – other pleasures of my choosing, such as listening to poetry, reading fiction, singing and cooking, which keep me stimulated and motivated to learn – I am enabled to reorient my criticality and aesthetics.
Camilla Boemio: Which different environments and social situations have you explored?
Pia Lindman: I have engaged with temporary collectivities as well as more permanent collectivities. My healing practice has found its spaces both in physical environments as well as online, some in art contexts, some outside of it. I have entered spaces both as a healer as well as someone being healed – most often at the same time.
An example of a temporary collectivity I create are spell-singing workshops. For those, I invite singers to come and learn to sing spells. Our aim is to use the resonating force of our voices to “massage” environmental toxins so that they transform into states less harmful to life.
A more permanent collectivity is our village, that we started in 2011 and still continue to build – both in terms of housing and in our ever developing and changing relationships. We support each other emotionally, socially, and physically. Sometimes we come together to perform “barn raisings”, something we in Finland call “talko” and the Norwegians call “dygnad”. The next “talko” will be in June of 2024, when I will make a call to sow by hand buckwheat in a field I have prepared for ecological farming over the course of two years.
Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen: I come from a family that has a history of four generations of visual impairments from my father’s side and a history of four generations of brittle bones disease from my mother’s side. I don’t feel like I’m exploring environments or social situations. I have the privilege every day to observe, how differently (and in what complex manners) those without disabilities around me act in many situations. I’m living in the middle of field research.
Vidha Saumya: I like to attend to my curiosities with sincerity. Whether I am experiencing the changing social space of Helsinki, where I live and work, or the bustle of my hometown, Mumbai, I try to pay attention to what I recognise, relate to, and find relevant to where my interest may be at that moment.
Camilla Boemio: As the curators explained in their curatorial text on ‘The pleasures we choose’, it is a myth that the artist is separate from the world, on the contrary, art and life are both inseparable and intertwined. Artists can give an important contribution to society; indeed, I always try to apply this holistic approach into my own practice and projects. Can you tell me how you align both art and activism in your work?
Pia Lindman: For me, artmaking and activist actions are intertwined to the degree that they are not just aligned but grow out of the same ilk. I see the building of our village (Solbacka-Fagervik) as an activist endeavour. Our community is trying to make concrete in life what we might propose as the most sustainable vision for human resilience in an uncertain future. Our village is my primary reference for the kinds of collectivities I espouse. Building it, living it, taught me to release rigid and unnecessary assumptions of my identity. This has had a direct effect on how I view myself as an artist and how I embrace painting as part of a collective life-sustaining everyday practice.
Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen: In 2016, the Government of Finland attempted to take away the subjective right to personal assistance from people over the age of 75. Combining art and activism I made a short film about 83-year-old Tuuli “Helkky” Helle living with cerebral palsy. She needed assistance in her work as an artist and dancer and due to her severe speech impairment. We underlined, that it is not possible to compare the services of people who have lived independently and done whatever they liked since their teens – to the services of those who got their independence at the age of 60 when the concept of personal assistance first arrived to Finland. We shared the film with members of parliament and screened it in seminars. It would be nice to think, that maybe the film had a tiny effect on the result that the age limit was rejected.
Vidha Saumya: I am deeply interested in plurality, no matter how non-cohesive my social, cultural, or political locations may be. That constant incomprehensibility creates space and opportunities to be committed to the vital moments of vulnerability of others. It enriches the many identities I live, perform, accommodate, and anticipate. Although it’s not a formula, doing so necessitates a living and working where art and activism are inseparable.
Camilla Boemio: In reference to the last question, do you think your practice has broader impact?
Pia Lindman: Quite like a treatment, that usually happens between two or a few persons, the effect of my art or my healing (the two are intertwined) often takes place in private encounters and exchanges. My sessions do not necessary effect masses of people in one go. However, a process of healing in one person might open pathways around this person. People (and other beings) in their environment may end up rethinking and redoing their lives. Someone might start with ecological farming or beekeeping. Or to build houses free of toxins and allowing for microbes to co-habit. Bacteria living in your house might no longer pick up aggressive resonances and cease to wage war by emitting toxins. To heal is to make heal.
An edition of my living paintings titled “Collectivity Cycle, Embodied Wefts” (now up in the exhibition “The Pleasures We Choose” in the Finnish Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennial) will in the future be screened in Tong Ren Station in Quincy, MA, USA. This is where Hardeep Mann does her Tong Ren sessions online to participants from all over the globe. I have made the paintings featured in “Collectivity Cycle, Embodied Wefts” during the year 2023, while in group sessions with Hardeep Mann. These paintings emerged from within my body and became visuals in front of my mind’s eye, as I was affected by the collective healing processes happening in the session. Everyone participating in these sessions contributed to the energies my system picked up and regurgitated into paintings. I hope that showing these paintings at Tong Ren Station may contribute to healing processes in the future.
Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen: The core of political disability art is to be inspired by the current hot topics in disability politics. I´ve worked closely with disability rights associations for 20 years and seen, how many of the issues that I’ve dealt in arts have been improved. Still, the legitimate political battle is not done in the street performances but in Government cabinets.
Vidha Saumya: My practice is for my own pleasure. If that pleasure resonates with a wider audience or encourages them to become curious about and recognise their sources of pleasure, that would be a fulfilling outcome.
Camilla Boemio: What does it mean for you all to work together?
Pia Lindman: This process has made me look at more ways for collectivity to emerge – and uniquely in the context of a contemporary art “scene”.
For me working together in this way: seeking to create an embodied and caring space inside one of the pinnacles of what is deemed the international art scene today, is to work towards collectivity. This work involves more-than-humans and necessitates the release of the idea of a self-contained personhood or identity as artist. Instead, it means to embrace one’s own porosity: to become part of the swarm. I hope that the Finnish pavilion in this moment becomes rather like a healing beehive.
Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen: Good discussions, peer support and laughter. We all share the experience of living in an environment that wasn’t really designed with us in mind.
Vidha Saumya: Working together is a joyous opportunity to nestle in others’ capacities and curiosities and learn new ways to comprehend what it means to care, recognise what forms a uniting interest, be invested in criticism, and navigate each other’s multi-process work.
Camilla Boemio: How do you explore serious subject matters which relate to your own individual experiences whilst focusing on pleasure and conveying powerful messages to audiences?
Pia Lindman: This is the work that must be done. It requires listening, acknowledging one another, and patience. You come to have faith in the process and in the energy of others. You find yourself approaching openly many different kinds of contexts and people – faith in each other makes us know we will have each other’s backs. Perhaps also of those you deem irredeemable. You come together. By coming together as a collectivity – again and again – you grow into the insight of a “message” and act upon it, rather than simply become a receiver of a message dictated from an outside. I hope the exhibition engages the audience in the same way.
Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen: Activism brings me pleasure, but instead of my own experiences, I am more interested in the structures that maintain discrimination of people with disabilities. Especially related to ableism and oppression, even the huge structural injustices are always tried to be bypassed and silenced by apologizing for the bad individual experience. Like my topic in Venice, hate speech against people with disabilities in social and health care. My art is not about me but about the way of treating people whose qualities differ from the imaginary norms.
Vidha Saumya: Pleasure is serious work, to begin with. It is not a sieve through which I pour my subjects to give the audience an essentialised residue of my work. The audience will wrestle through the same difficulties and will be able to discover a nuanced understanding of the work for themselves.
Camilla Boemio: What is “access architecture” as defined by the exhibition
Pia Lindman: There are some concrete ways access has been incorporated into the space, such as: installing ramps for wheelchairs, audio description of all the works for the visually impaired, and one of the breathing holes in “Collectivities Cycle, Air Conditioner” is designed to facilitate easy docking of a wheel chair. Furthermore, the hand rail not only changes the experience of the geometry of Alvar Aalto’s architecture, but also gives support and guidance through the space and the experience of the art.
“Collectivities Cycle, Air Conditioner” is made of clay, a material that in itself transforms the indoor air and makes it more breathable. Microbes find a hospitable environment there and thus improve the air quality. For some this may mean the difference between being able to stay in the space or leave.
I think of access as making space socially, emotionally, and physically inclusive. It is about creating a space where the objects – artworks and architectural elements alike – invite a co-habitation with them. At the Aalto Pavilion it is about reworking the imposing modernist architecture into something more embracing, embodied, breathing – with a living energy.
Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen: In this project, we´ve used the biodiversity of our team to create a pleasurable space where no-one has to strive to feel like a “credible” guest. Room, that doesn’t spoil anyone´s performance or identity. In the pavilion we have a handrail, from which you can take physical or mental support. There is also an audio description, that makes possible to experience the exhibition online, all around the world. Access architecture is a mindset that improves our chances of coping with change, both individually and as a society.
Vidha Saumya: I see it as an organising strategy with the intention of resistance and repair, a timely responsibility towards our collective environs.
Vidha Saumya, Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen and Pia Lindman. Image: Jo Hislop / Frame Contemporary Art Finland.
Pia Lindman explores the world of the subsensorial. After being poisoned by Mercury, her nervous system became sensitized to micro-signals from within her body. These signals she transforms into images, melodies, words, and colors, allowing her to tune into atmospheres, toxicities and materiality in different spatial and social conditions. She has exhibited at the 32nd São Paulo Biennial, MoMA, MoMA PS1 and HKW in Berlin and was a fellow at Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT (2004–2007).
Vidha Saumya’s practice weaves together notions of exile and utopia, questioning the normatives of aesthetics and socio-political ecologies. Through acrid humour, haptic textures, and arduous workwomanship, her poems, drawings, photographs, videos, books, embroidery, sculptures, culinary interventions, and digital artefacts are at once accessible and intensely challenging. She is co-founder and co-editor of NO NIIN Magazine and a founding member of Museum of Impossible Forms.
Jenni–Juulia Wallinheimo–Heimonen is a multidisciplinary artist and disability activist whose work spans sculpture, video, performance and activism within disability politics and policy. Her works deal with structural violence and discrimination framed as kindness, and issues related to women with disabilities. Wallinheimo-Heimonen has facilitated social art workshops and participated in exhibitions in Finland and abroad. She received the Finnish State Prize for Multidisciplinary Art in 2019.
Camilla Boemio is an internationally published author, curator, and member of the AICA (International Arts Critics) and IKT (International), based in Rome. In 2013, Boemio was the co-associate curator of PORTABLE NATION: Disappearance as Work in Progress – Approaches to Ecological Romanticism, the Maldives Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. In 2016, Boemio curated Diminished Capacity, the first Nigerian Pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia.
Boemio’s recent curatorial projects include her role as co-associate curator at Pera + Flora + Fauna. The Story of Indigenousness and The Ownership of History, supported by Port Perak in Malesya, an official collateral event at the 59th International art exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, 2022; Zoè Gruni: Matherwood curated at Galleria Il Ponte, 2023; and Stefano Cagol: The Bouvet Island co-curated at ETRU Museo Nazionale Etrusco in Roma, 2024 .
