2026

Photograph and performance piece
Print on canvas and metal hanger
Size: 80 cm x 185 cm x 8 cm

The photograph and performance piece Young Artist is a coverall-like suit that surface is printed with life-sized photograph of me. In the performance, I step inside my photograph and bring it to life. Funnily at the same moment, I become an artwork an object that shouldn’t be alive. This creates an uncanny experience for the audience, who are left wondering whether they are looking at a sculpture or whether there is a real human being inside it.

On the surface of the suit, the photo transforms into a strange and distorted figure through which I want to evoke curiosity and explore the relationship between an image and the truth it represents. Young Artist wanders and wonders, and in the end it will be defined only through interaction with its surroundings and audience.

Images are everywhere. They live lives of their own, disappear and return again. They are embodiments of thought, through which I can see — and show you — how I imagine reality. Images evoke emotions and change the way I exist. And when I am gone, my images remain.

Exhibited in Young artist exhibition 29.5. - 19.7.2026 Three times a week, for about two hours at a time, I walked in the suit around the Kunsthalle and the centre of Helsinki. While the performance happened, an empty human-shaped hanger remained in the exhibition space where the artwork was placed. Other times the suit hanged from the hanger as a photographic artwork. 

Read the art review from Mustekala cultural magazine (in finnish):
Nuori nykytaide ja nuoren taiteilijan haasteet – Generation 2026 ja Nuoret 2026


Credits and acknowledgements
Photographs of the artist for the performance costume: Vilja Harala and Lassi Hakkinen
Costume designer: Sini Saavala
Supported by: Arts Promotion Centre Finland