Temporary Presence exhibition celebrates 30 years of the Visiting Artist Residency Programme by the Wihuri Foundation and University of Lapland. Curator Angela Rosenberg has assembled the exhibition from works by artists invited to Rovaniemi between 1995 and 2025.

The exhibition Temporary Presence celebrates the 30-year collaboration between Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation and the University of Lapland, as well as their joint artist residency program. The exhibition is drawn from the Wihuri Foundation Collection and is on display at the Rovaniemi Art Museum and Gallery Valo, Arktikum. It has been curated by Angela Rosenberg, an art historian, mentor, and curator based in Berlin.

Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation supports Finnish contemporary art by annually expanding the Wihuri Foundation Collection at the Rovaniemi Art Museum. Over the years, the collection has grown into one of the most significant contemporary art collections in Finland, and various forms of collaboration have developed around it. One collaboration is the scholarship program organized by the University of Lapland and the Wihuri Foundation since 1995, which enables two visual artists working in Finland to spend a three-month working period in Rovaniemi each year.

Curator Angela Rosenberg has assembled the exhibition from works by artists invited to Rovaniemi between 1995 and 2025. Rosenberg has included twelve artistic positions in an exhibition that explores the subtle relations of presence and absence in contemporary visual arts, with a specific focus on painting.

Informed by their individual biographic experiences, artistic research and practice, artists cultivate individual visual languages, which allow for the creation of unique, precise and sincere depictions of subjective viewpoints. Put together these viewpoints don’t form a single coherent narrative, but present facets of the world we live in and create together.

Consequently, the exhibition presents diverging, even conflicting perspectives and reflects on complimentary aspects of the works, which can be regarded as a conversation along three coordinates of the image: figuration, abstraction and the distinction between the real world and its representation.

Rovaniemi Art Museum’s exhibition shows paintings exploring the potential of figuration to express states of mind, rendering an inner world, in visceral, emotional, erotic, and humorous works. Alongside these figurative pieces, the exhibition also delves into abstraction, where the inner world transcends into another realm, with painterly reflections on natural forms that crystallize into vast abstractions, impossible shapes, and sublime landscapes.

The exhibition at Arktikum’s Gallery Valo reflects on the question of what constitutes an image and expands on the formal constraints of painting, literally going beyond the frame and crossing the line from the image to the real world, from absence to presence, and back.

Participating artists: Heli Hiltunen, Irmeli Hulkko, Pertti Kekarainen, Jukka Korkeila, Lotta Määttänen, Jussi Niva, Riitta Päiväläinen, Tarja Pitkänen-Walter, Anna Retulainen, Paavo Räbinä, Janne Räisänen and Pekka Vesterinen.

At Gallery Valo a temporary library and reading room with selected publications on the artists are on display to complete the exhibition.

Temporary Presence – From Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation Collection

12.4.–14.9.2025 Rovaniemi art museum
30.5.–17.8.2025 Gallery Valo, Arktikum

The first part of the exhibition opens to the public at the Rovaniemi Art Museum on April 12, and the second at Galleria Valo on May 30. The opening event and a seminar built around the visiting artist program will be held on Wednesday, May 28, 2025.

Main image: Riitta Päiväläinen, Vespertine II, from the Series Vestige Wind. Photographed by Tatu Kantomaa
Cover image: Jussi Niva, I spy with my eyes something being as gold. Photographed by Tatu Kantomaa