Ars Fennica 2025

Bley paints on the floor of her studio in Oslo, pouring and scraping paint over sail cloth and other materials to create layers of colour. She also works on PVC with thick enamel paint, which instead of absorbing into the surface, takes on a sculptural form. Bley has even sewn pockets onto canvases, filling them with organic materials such as tea leaves, dried raspberries, and turmeric. These works are then placed outdoors, which makes the motifs live based on the forces of the weather. Beyond the vivid and shifting qualities of colour, however, the works are also infused with a variety of references to science fiction, science and art history.  

The starting point is often personal and emotional, a process guided by intuition and bodily experience. Through countless sketches, the artist explores forms and constellations to find ambivalent spaces or states. Her paintings give a sense of capturing the image in the slow process of its formation and evolution, like an organism of uncertain status. The organic forms can be seen as a kind of social amoeba, functioning both as a large-scale body and as small individual units, wherein Bley questions the common binary division between individual and group in contemporary society.  

Ragna Bley (b. 1986, Sweden) lives in Oslo. She holds a BA in Fine Art from the Oslo Art Academy (2011) and an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, London (2015). Bley has had solo exhibitions at Malmö Konsthall, Kunstnernes Hus, OSL Contemporary, Kunsthuset Kabuso, and Downs & Ross in New York, as well as at Pilar Corrias Gallery in London. Her work is included in prestigious collections such as Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Kistefos Museum, Nasjonalmuseet, and Astrup Fearnley Museet in Norway, as well as Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Malmö Konstmuseum, and Statens Konstråd in Sweden. 

Persson’s work features objects or fragments of nature to which he has a special connection or with which he grew up. The subject can also be stories or fantasies that are loaded with something that concerns him personally. 

Persson has long worked with pigmented silicone rubber casts to achieve the right organic appearance. Chance plays a crucial role in the creation of these sculptures and serves as an aesthetic expression in its own right. Persson is also known for his many public artworks in Sweden. Made from silicone or painted bronze and aluminium, the works convey playfulness, femininity, colour and conceptuality. Drawing is fundamental to Persson’s practice. He creates large-scale drawings on yellowed paper, meticulously composed with dots, depicting motifs such as cactuses, animal anatomy, or glass cabinets with skeletons inside. These drawings are a kind of complement to the sculptures, suggesting a scientific thrust or an explanation of something elusive. 

Roland Persson (b. 1963) is based in Stockholm. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Umeå in 1993, and furthered his studies at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Persson’s academic background is enriched by his interest in theoretical psychoanalysis, which is evident in the subconscious and analytical aspects of his work. Persson’s art has been showcased in solo and group exhibitions across the Nordic countries and Europe, as well as in Russia and Asia. In Finland, his work has been featured in museum exhibitions at Amos Rex and the HAM Helsinki Art Museum in 2024, and he had a solo exhibition at the Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art in Vaasa in 2023. 

Their sculptural video installations and flowing site-specific murals transform architectures, often integrating the physical context of their environments in order to unsettle any stable orientation or corporeality. As also seen in their woodcuts and reliefs, Ruscica’s relational processes of figurative abstraction and collaging maintain a risky openness to interpretation, sparking visual and material conversations with viewers that can frustrate our automatic practices of de-coding.

Attending to the moments when clear meaning disintegrates, Ruscica never portrays a subject but rather shows us how relationships between language, sound, form, and the body are constantly in flux–these animate, nonbinary, in-between moments point to the politics of their practice. Their work queerly refuses the trappings of singular meaning and taxonomic categorization that are used to submit particular subjects or objects to larger systems of power. Instead, Ruscica performatively activates the contradiction and opacity inherent in visual phenomena, their playful iconicity giving way to hybridity, multiplicity, and boundless movement. 

Jani Ruscica (b. 1978, Finland/Italy) lives and works in Helsinki. They studied sculpture at Chelsea College of Art & Design in London (BA 2002) and media art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki (MA 2007). Ruscica has held many solo exhibitions, most recently at Kunsthalle Helsinki (2022) and 1646 Art Space in The Hague (2021). Their works have appeared in many international group exhibitions, including Kiran Nadar Museum, New Delhi (2023); 6th Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2023); HAM Helsinki Art Museum (2023); MMOMA, Moscow (2021); AGWA, Perth (2020); and the 1st Riga Biennial (2018). Ruscica has work in the collections of Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Saastamoinen Foundation, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, among others. In 2018, they were awarded the William Thuring main prize.

Inspired by everyday observations, her subjects range from weeds and smoke breaks to Mercedes cars. Despite their everyday underpinnings, Vihriälä’s works are deeply personal, yet she succeeds in making them universally relatable, conveying emotions that many can identify with, such as the death of a parent, childhood memories, or greed. An ordinary object is magnified to an enormous size, taking on dreamlike, unreal features. Vihriälä’s visual language blends elements of graphic art, painting, and sculpture. Her works also engage multiple senses, such as a piece made of 200,000 pieces of sweet-scented candy forming a giant rose, expressing themes of desire, pleasure, and temptation.  

Vihriälä is known for her numerous public works in schools and hospitals across Finland. Her work is highly site-specific, with dimensions and sometimes content and materials sourced from the installation locations. Vihriälä also uses bronze, cast iron, aluminium, and brass, such as when she created animal noses in alphabetical order on a primary school wall. She often engages with local residents, encouraging them to contribute materials to her creations, such as pink toys, knitting needles, plastic screw caps, mobile phone cases, straws, and balls, building from them a huge flying, youthful heart.  

Hanna Vihriälä (b. 1974 in Oulainen, lives and works in Tampere, Finland) graduated from the sculpture department of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2003. She also holds a degree in sculpture from the Estonian Academy of Arts. Since 1999, she has exhibited her work at the Sculptor and Forum Box galleries and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, among others. Vihriälä has work in the collections of Föreningen Konstsamfundet – Amos Rex, Kiasma, and the Wäinö Aaltonen Museum in Finland.  

Beyond Japan, Kataoka has held positions at the Hayward Gallery in London from 2007 to 2009 as International Curator; she has also acted as Co-Artistic Director for the 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012), Artistic Director for the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018) and Artistic Director for the Aichi Triennale 2022. Kataoka served as a Board Member (2014–2022) and the President (2020–2022) of CIMAM (International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art). 

At Mori Art Museum, Kataoka has curated a number of mid-career survey shows of Asian artist including Tsuyoshi Ozawa (2004), Ai Weiwei (2009), Lee Bul (2012), Makoto Aida (2012), Lee Mingwei (2014) , NS Harsha (2017) and Chiharu Shiota (2019) while co-curated regional shows including SUNSHOWER : Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now (2017) and Roppongi Crossing: Contemporary Japanese Art in 2004 and 2013.  

Kataoka frequently writes, lectures, and juries on contemporary art from Japan, Asia and beyond.