Interviews
Bulldozers, often seen as neutral tools of industrial demolition, are instruments of territorial domination, urban redevelopment, and political suppression. Yet within these acts of destruction, counter-narratives emerge—poetry, mourning, and collective remembrance—that reclaim agency in the face of state-sanctioned ruination. If ruination is a strategy of power, it is also a site of resistance.
READOn Bulldozer Politics: An Interview with Léopold Lambert & Shivangi Mariam Raj
Ruins are not just remnants of the past—they are strategic, political, and weaponised with intent. In this conversation on ‘Bulldozer Politics,’ Léopold Lambert & Shivangi Mariam Raj of the Funambulist explore how demolition and displacement serve state power while also becoming spaces of resistance and remembrance.
The role of the artists’ associations/unions in cultural politics is even more important when new legislation, guidelines or practices are proposed. If the artists’ associations are not convincing and actively participating in the negotiations about legislation, nobody else will look after their interests.
READArt is a Revolutionary Power: An Interview with Teemu Mäki
Triinu Soikmets and Teemu Mäki discuss the vital role of artist unions in challenging market vulnerabilities and art’s revolutionary power in societal change.
Photography is an inherently uneven way of viewing. For centuries, there has been a desire to identify with that apparatus in the West, and for mysterious reasons, still to me, as a way to identify with the technology and disavow the messiness of human vision, which is pretty much based on vision, which is very much easily distracted, very much individualized.
READAlienation, Authenticity, and the Human Scale: An Interview with Stan Douglas
Ali Akbar Mehta interviews Stan Douglas on the complexities of photography and its inherent alienation that can be harnessed to disrupt traditional narratives and offer fresh perspectives on history.
So Palestine being temporarily suspended is the basis for how we conceptualize things between the catastrophes of the past, the Nakba, and everything else, and the ambitions for a state that seems to constantly move further and further into the future. And that means that the present remains sort of an unsettled purgatory.
READIn Attempts to (Un)forge Present: An Interview with Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind
Rania Atef in conversation with Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind on the occasion of their exhibition at the Amos Rex Museum where they push the boundaries of the audience’s imagination about national identity, loss, memory and trauma.
How to transform smell through a painted picture? And what ethical questions are at hand when depicting a friend in a picture? Joel Slotte has, in the past decade, developed a style of painting that reminds of numerous pop culture references and recognizable aesthetics which has been called “slotte-like” and ”slotte-esque” in Finnish art criticism. As an artist, Slotte works across drawing and sculpture in addition to painting, as the different mediums emerge in surprising ways.
READPainting the Self and the Close Ones: An Interview with Joel Slotte
Eero Karjalainen in conversation with Joel Slotte, exploring Joel’s process, the display of reference material in his work, the ethical side of using personal references of an artist and the impact and role of people close to him in his work, and the infrastructures of the art world and the fragility in which we operate.
I use the exhibition as a medium, both as a context that guides my research and the creation of works as a documentation of this process. It is always an unknown process, I can’t decide what I encounter, and therefore, the selection of the works becomes very intuitive and, hence, uncertain. But of course, decisions are always made, so the ghosts arrive with them. There isn’t any exhibition, archive, or museum that is not haunted by ghosts, it’s all about one’s intentions and a certain awareness.
READA Tender Meandering, Daydreaming in Archives: An Interview with Xiao Zhiyu
Vinayak interviews artist Xiao Zhiyu at the site of his exhibition Layered hills send off glimmering light at the Helsinki Art Museum to find out more about their process and strategies used in exhibition making as practice.
Cooking Sections’ recent visit to Finland was centred around the IHME Helsinki Commission 2024 Maaleipä Challenge, which invited home bakers, bakeries, restaurants, schools, and communities in Finland to create bread recipes that combine the well-being of land, water and people’s guts. Cooking Sections’ projects use food as a medium to question global food production and also confront the inequities within food systems. The core of their modus operandi is gathering the latest scientific knowledge by meeting researchers and experienced experts.
READRethinking (Climate) Security Through Food: An Interview with Cooking Sections
Ines Montalvao talks to Cooking Sections about the impact of linking food to broader definitions of security and resilience through projects that challenge global food systems and engage local ecologies and communities to inspire change.
Finally, someone was addressing the complicated questions around contemporary ‘Eastern Europeanness’ and what often felt like a misrepresentation, misunderstanding or complete omission of the region and its identity in the ‘Western’ discourse. Through Kajet – a Journal of Eastern European encounters – Laura and Petrică offer a space for speculative reformulation of Eastern European identities, narratives and imaginaries, as an attempt towards what they call ‘a representation without purity’.
READThe Futures That Never Came Into Being: An Interview with Kajet Journal Editors
Martina Šerešová in conversation with Kajet journal editors Petrică Mogoș and Laura Naum on re-contextualising the region of Eastern Europe and the generative potential of time, complexity and utopian thinking.
When experienced as an uninterrupted single-channel projection, they collectively transformed into a poetry book bound within a single cover. This collection of poetic videos invites the viewer to explore the delicate interplay between emotion and intellect, where the vastness of the sea becomes a metaphor for unspoken, uncontrollable desires—touching on themes of solitude, longing, and the deep connection between women and the sea. Observing these elements, I became eager to learn about the background and thought processes behind this work to better understand the emotional and conceptual depth of Nastja’s creative process.
READOn Personal and Imaginative Narratives Set at Sea: An Interview with Nastja Säde Rönkkö
Eveliina Tuulonen interviews Nastja Säde Rönkkö, an artist working with video, performance, installation, and text, on the sea’s mythic resonance, and about the processes and fascinations behind a project.
Performance is a space for something else. I am interested in what can turn around words and enter through different senses without a rational filter. I believe we have less protection for gestures and less digestive capacity for actions. In that way, performance can creep into the audience through the rational walls, perhaps affecting the spectator in other ways.
READLooking for the In-between: An Interview with Diana Soria Hernandez
Lois Armas interviews Diana Soria Hernandez on the nature of the spaces created in her performance art, her artistic processes over the years, and her need for exploring through performing what cannot be put into words.
A 15-year long project researching Arabic music in historic Palestine has unearthed many stories, records and musicians that have been lost, forgotten and suppressed after the Nakba. Headed by Nader Jalal, the Ramallah-based institute Nawa has not only collected this history, but brought it to a new life by organising concerts and recording albums.
READExploring Palestine’s Musical Heritage Before 1948: An interview with Nader Jalal
A 15-year long project researching Arabic music in historic Palestine has unearthed many stories, records and musicians that have been lost, forgotten and suppressed after the Nakba. Headed by Nader Jalal, the Ramallah-based institute Nawa has not only collected this history, but brought it to a new life by organising concerts and recording albums.
I met Anna Möttölä in early April, not long after she finished her seven-year term working as the executive director of L&A. Before that, I had mainly seen her introduce some of the films at the festival or lead some of the Q&As with filmmakers. In all that, something that shined through so clearly was how much she loves cinema and that, for her, this is not merely another job. I admire this quality, as I find it quite rare these days in people with higher institutional positions. Among the many things we discussed were what this job meant to her, the decision to leave it, the challenges and learning curves of the job, L&A as a political institution, and the struggles of running a festival in times of austerity.
READDirecting Helsinki’s Beloved Film Festival: An Interview with Anna Möttölä
A conversation with Anna Möttölä on the occasion of her finishing a seven-year term as Helsinki International Film Festival: Love & Anarchy’s executive director.
