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MEET
/THE/ARTISTS 

The festival revolves around the theme of Success and Glory. The theme of the festival questions the future of a capitalistic society and speculates on the alternative and flexible forms of success. The selected artists explore the idea of success in modern society through a variety of perspectives and materials, questioning the glorified image of success and offering an insight into the work and exhaustion behind it. The artists contemplate the ideas of consumerism, the cult of success, the fast pace of life, and resistance towards it. The exhibition disrupts the commercial environment of Hansakäytävä, juxtaposing the built environments of shopping malls and offices with nature and emotionality. The works reflect personal perspectives and volatile feelings towards success.

As part of the festival, artists were invited to a four-day residency period at the Easton shopping center, where they worked together as a community before the exhibition.

Read more about the works and artists below:








Mira caselius

Mira Caselius























@mira_caselius
Mira Caselius (Finland, 1984)  is a multidisciplinary artist from Helsinki. Her main media are watercolour and ink, but her working methods range from drawing and painting to video, installation art and writing. Her melancholic, subtly emotional works investigate social constructs, transgenerational emotional memories, social origins of mental health issues and depict humans as interconnected mesh transcending space and time.


2025 Knotted Woman (Pencil and watercolour on paper)

2025 Unwind Me (Coloured ink and watercolour on paper)

2024 Worn (Watercolour and ink on paper)

2023 Gravity is stronger today (Pencil and watercolour on paper)

2024 The Space of One's Own (Watercolour and ink on paper)
2023 The Impossibility of Life (Coloured ink on paper)

The series of watercolor and ink paintings stem from Caselius’ personal memories of existential struggles of fitting into the efficiency driven society and its outspoken norms. She experiences events and thoughts often in a physical way, and this is depicted in (self)portraits of people quenched in perfectionism and pressures of the cult of success. The society and media are trying to foster young people into this cult and that makes a person tie oneself into knots. The painting “Knotted Woman” was completed as part of the Art for All festival residency in August 2025.









Alan Guerra

























Alan Guerra is a Mexican classical guitarist with a distinguished international career marked by performance, teaching, the promotion of Latin American music, and the development of cultural projects in diverse contexts. He has built his career between Mexico and Finland, where he combines classical repertoire performance with the research and dissemination of Mexican folk traditions. His performances include solo recitals and collaborations in renowned venues such as the Musiikkitalo in Helsinki, and festivals including the Cervantino International Festival, Kaustinen Folk Music Festival, Sinaloa Cultural Festival, Feel Helsinki, and more. He has worked with ensembles such as “Jaranas del Norte” and “Ensamble Youak,” promoting traditional Mexican music in contemporary formats.




Echoes of Glory

Classical music performance

Performances:
Friday August 22 at 19:45
Sunday August 24 the artist is present 16:00-19:00

Echoes of Glory  is a live classical guitar performance series designed to bring moments of calm, reflection, and subtle grandeur into the everyday noise of a shopping centre. The project draws on the idea of “success” not as loud, fast, or profitable—but as quiet excellence, emotional depth, and human connection.

On the opening night on Friday 22.8, and on Sunday 24.8, Alan Guerra will perform short classical guitar sets in various locations within Easton, blending into the space organically. The repertoire will include works by composers such as Francisco Tárrega, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Johann Sebastian Bach—pieces that embody both technical mastery and emotional nuance.

The music will act as a soft disruption in the commercial environment: a slow, sincere offering in contrast to the fast pace of shopping and consumption. Audiences may choose to stop and listen or simply pass by—the performance is not staged but integrated into the everyday rhythm of the mall. The guitar, as an instrument of intimacy and expression, provides a powerful metaphor for alternative forms of success: those that are internal, lived, and felt rather than seen or purchased.








Calvin Guillot




















@cgxatlas
Calvin Guillot (Colombia, 1990) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Helsinki.  His practice encompasses a range of mediums, from traditional painting and street art, generative art and AI, to parametric sculpture and artificial synthetic life. He aims to uncover new ways to engage with the world around us and seeks to minimise the ego of the audience by exploring the sublime, infinitism, and identity. Guillot likes to push the boundaries of possible at the intersection of art, science, and technology. He believes that the context is the most fundamental part of an art piece: the works are connected through a common process of discovery, experimentation and play.  


Consumed

2025, video on screen, speakers


According to Guillot, many problems in our modern world can be attributed to a single root: unrestricted consumption, which is encouraged and fundamentally necessary for the current form of Capitalism. The shopping mall, for him, is a symbol of wasteful city planning, where new venues, metro stations and residential areas catalyse the emergence of shopping malls, even adjacent to existing ones.

The digitally created video work raises the question how much more are we going to build until it's enough? In the video the uncontrollable growth of shopping centers, driven by frenzy for over-consumption is seen through an amalgamation of images and maps from Eastern Helsinki and simulated geometry.









Aida Matuseviciute

















@aifourda

Aida Matuseviciute is a conceptual, interdisciplinary, intermedia artist of Lithuanian descent, currently residing and working in Helsinki. Aida holds BA from Vilnius Academy of Arts and MA from Aalto University, Design Department. Her work primarily revolves around the study of therapeutic ecologies and the advancement of human sensibilities through engagement with creative environmental practices and the complexities of societal power relationships. This inquiry manifests in her artistic exploration of varying sensory and perceptual capabilities. To delve into these themes, Aida utilizes a diverse range of methodologies, including archaic symbolism, language tools, ritualism, indigenous cosmology, meditative art therapy, ethnography and embodied practices. Her tactile understanding of materiality, due to background in textile, prints and regenerative fashion, contributes to deepened conceptual analysis of touch. Likewise, she places significant emphasis on examining tacit knowledge while making environmentally conscious decisions in her artistic pursuits.


Who consumes you?

2025, Mixed media installation, Baking paper

Project “Who consumes you?” questions the fact that regardless of control over other living species, new predatory archetypes are arising. New eating chains are created, where humans are a food. Although people escaped the well-known eating chain between other mammals and animal species, in the current modern world people are consumed by the processed foods, ill thoughts, ill-defined problems, inner or public conflicts, societal expectations, environmental pollution and ultimately by the constant seeking of control over the natural world as this also causes the separation from it.

This artistic study is conducted through documenting and gathering baking paper after dinners. The shapes were created through positioning processed foods on the baking paper. The project explores humanity’s willingness to control nature. Abstract post dinner shapes allude to the inner landscape of the humans and the bacteria, which are processing the consumed products.







Olli Pikkarainen






















@olli_asia
Olli Pikkarainen (Finland, 1983) has spent 15 years animating strange dreams and digital worlds in the video game industry. His creative journey in Helsinki began 20 years ago in Kauppakartanonkatu, not far from Itäkeskus.


Gloryhole™

2025, Video Installation

Gloryhole™ is a place where the outcome is unknown—yet one enters willingly. Instead of a shopping mall info display, the screen shows a dystopian vision where all that remains of the civilization in Itäkeskus. The work juxtaposes loss and success, shame and desire. What is left of us after all the wanting?

Gloryhole™ is created using photogrammetry, a technique where fragments of Finnish forests have been scanned into 3D models and finally combined into a surreal landscape inside a game engine.







Taru Samola




















@marianne.turtio
Taru Samola (Finland, 1984) is a photography artist and writer whose works deal with themes of desire, power, shame and corporality. Samola combines photography with various spatial, narrative and recycled materials. As a person living in a rural setting without a driver’s license Samola’s goal is to produce large works that can be transported in a compact space such as on a top shelf of a train or a bicycle bag if necessary.


(katse)

2025, Cyanotype on thermal paper

Samola sees capitalism cultivating a constant feeling of inadequacy and the desire to become the best version of oneself – whether measured in terms of appearance, career, or attention. Alternatively, being seen is a term of acceptance and individuality, something that is considered healthy and mature.. Samola’s installation borrows Michel Foucault's idea of the panoptic gaze. According to Foucault, the normative gaze extends to all corners of society, causing individuals to internalize society's assumptions, imagining that they are following their inner will. Samola has repurposed over 300 shopping receipts printing them with cyanotype method, creating layered meanings and functions. Each paper is a proof of a transaction, yet as a whole they form a more ominous entity, gazing at us on the Hansakäytävä.







Joonas Siren























@fffforces
Joonas Siren (Finland, 1983) has graduated as Master of Fine Arts from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2013, as BFA in 2012 and also as a MFA from the joint-study program Nordic Sound Art co-organized between five different Nordic Art Academies in 2012. They work with multidisciplinary methods, often using sound as an artistic material, but not in a strictly musical sense. Joonas’ work often takes the form of installations, usually containing computer programmed elements.


Capital Logic

2025, Moving image, sound environment

Capital Logic is an installation consisting of moving image works, generative sound environment and site-specific gestures. The sound material of the generative piece are recordings of the Itäkeskus shopping mall sound commercials, but completely transformed with pitch-shifting, time-stretching and other sound manipulations. The piece creates an atmosphere of uncanniness and absurdity to the sound environment of Itäkeskus. The installation site is also modified with different residual objects of capitalist culture. The moving image uses clichés of advertisement in dysfunctional ways.





Jorden Senior






















@jordensenior
Jorden Senior is a photographic artist working with experimental photography processes. Their practice employs unstable darkroom techniques including mordançage, lith, and alternative chemistry to create photographs that exist as temporal, chemical objects. They use these unpredictable processes to interrogate the relationship between surface and depth, revealing hidden layers within both image and subject through the material transformation of the photographic medium itself.


Beneath the Surface

2025, Photo prints on paper, Mordançage

Beneath the Surface explores the hidden layers within constructed environments through analogue photographic processes. Each image begins as a film negative, hand-developed and printed in the artist's darkroom before undergoing the mordançage process, chemically softening the silver emulsion, allowing parts of the image to lift, distort, or bleach. Rather than suggesting decay, this transformation reflects the tactile, layered reality behind clean commercial facades—something more flexible and lived-in than appearances suggest. 


Vilma Vanhanen




























@vilma.vanhanen
Vilma Vanhanen (Finland, 1997) is a multidisciplinary spatial artist and designer. Her practices investigate themes around injustice, trauma, empathy and freedom combining activism, sculpture, spatial installations, material exploration, and bodily experience. Vilma’s artistic process realizes itself through urgent obsession—whether through indignation, curiosity, or a deep need for connection— where intuition often plays a key role. She gravitates toward overlooked or forgotten subjects, aiming to make them visible and foster understanding of complex issues.


Watch me on Insta live, when I discard myself!!!

2025, Performance and live video stream

Vanhanen describes herself as someone who’s spent her youth mainly in suburban shopping malls. Memories evoke contradictory feelings as now she’s the consumer-adult, finally welcomed by the malls but no longer interested in spending time in them.

The performance work interrogates the measures of success and shame, especially within social media. In order to be credible, success needs to be seen, either in materialism or as a numerical value. You have to be open and genuine but not posting bad days. The requirements are tough, but the posts should look effortless.

The performance unfolds over three days inside an unused shopfront and on instagram live stream. She brings her entire wardrobe to the shop and starts evaluating clothes one by one, konmari style, discarding others and keeping others. Which clothes and dance moves will bring her more views? What if no one is watching, does she even exist? Will the shopping center visitors stop by? Should they feel empathy in the face of failure?


Minja Yletyinen + Arto Muukka



















Minja Yletyinen is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Helsinki. Born in Polvijärvi, North Karelia, her research-driven and collaborative works explore lived experience through themes of class and play.

Arto Muukka is a Helsinki-based actor, clown and physical theatre educationer. Together with artist and actor Annukka Lindqvist they make the clown duo Nordic Nonsense. Both alumnis of École LASSAAD, their performance Rakkauden Rytmit premieres at Nukketeatteri Sampo’s new stage Pikku Sampo on Friday 5.9.2025.


Paini (The Wrestle)

2022-, Video installation

Two performers begin playing a game, in which one is supposed to dress the other in a white collar worker’s or contemporary artist’s costume, and the other to resist. The game continues like this for a while, and the roles are then reversed, until they are reversed again. There is no way to win the game – it is designed to continue until exhaustion. At its core is an endless, laborious and frustrating power struggle.

In their time, JVC TM-1700PNs were commonly used as security monitors in places like this shopping mall. They are nowadays popular in the modded analog gaming and visual jockeying scene. There is something soothing in the blurred edges of the image and the big and bulky design of the object itself. Nostalgia is balsam to the wounds of disappointment and disenchantment.

Performing Minja Yletyinen and Arto Muukka.
Camera operator and timing the play Jasmin Gummerus.
Concept and directing Minja Yletyinen.