KARI HUHTAMO ART FOUNDATION

SUOMI

2015 NORTHERN ARTIST

Alma Heikkilä: cohesion, hydrocarbons, aspen, search engine, language and the others: Things that are massively distributed in time and space.

EMMA Espoo Museum of Modern Art. 14.10. – 05.12.2015.

Alma Heikkilä - EMMA Espoo Museum of Modern Art
photo © EMMA

 

New generations will ask themselves what am I and what do I consist of? Thus is also with art. Our main exhibition opening tonight - Passion According to Carol Rama - is challenged by the exhibition of the young Alma Heikkilä. In her time Rama mirrored humanity through a very personal experience. Heikkilä does the same - but in an exactly opposite way. What is the universe and how is it related to the questions of humanity? The perspective is not that of an individual, or the artist herself, but rather a cosmic view directed towards humanity. Huge bet, I would say. And brave in a very different way from Rama.

Amazingly enough, in addition to courage, there are other similarities: I cannot find any role models or parallels to these artists. I see them both searching for the answer to the fundamental questions of life through radically new and personal questions. To modern man universal consciousness is very much a personal issue. We are frighteningly aware of the threats to the world, which forces us to consider whether humanity is after all only one stage in Earth's history? The question has to be asked, because after the human demise, nature, laws of physics, the molecules and the material objects - for example the sun - remain. Heikkilä’s universally enigmatic works refer to elements of matter and the universe. They do not go away, so could we also define ourselves today through these facts?

Today we are celebrating a special and talented young artist Alma Heikkilä. At the same time we conclude the series of three exhibitions in cooperation with the Kari Huhtamo Art Foundation. During this period, we have seen new initiatives not only from Heikkilä, but also from Jaakko Mattila and Mia Hamari at EMMA’s experimental art space, Areena. I warmly thank Kari Huhtamo Foundation and their secretary general and our partner Katariina Lipsanen. I hope this fruitful cooperation that is now at the end, can also be a beginning of a new cooperation.

Excerpt from the opening speech of 10.13.2015

Pilvi Kalhama
EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art
translation: Katariina Lipsanen