Reading Room catalogue

ARS22 is the tenth edition in the series of major international contemporary art exhibitions originally launched in 1961 in Helsinki. Extending to all floors of the Kiasma building, it is a comprehensive view of the latest trends in international contemporary art.

“ARS22 designs a choreography of gestures and positions that in their specificity and as a whole offer alternative paths to present-day detachment, disenchantment, isolation, and hopelessness, making visible the mutually dependent dynamics between individual and collective imaginaries both in their continuities and in their ruptures. ARS22 Living Encounters is a gathering that celebrates the intimate, multiple, shared, and dynamic constitution of life on the planet while projecting dreams, doubts, and hopes into the future.” —João Laia

Featuring compelling essays and a richly illustrated section dedicated to the fifty-five artists in the exhibition, this catalogue guides the reader through the inspiring plurality of narratives that shape ARS22 Living Encounters.

This book traces connections between north and south as the catalogue for the Navigating North exhibition, which presents highlights from the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation Collection. Its guiding themes – landscape, northern nature and cultural crossroads – remind us that we exist in a state of perpetual change.

“The Unexpected Subject. 1978 Art and Feminism in Italy” exhibition recounts the Seventies as a key phase in the history of Italian art of the 20th century, during which the spread of feminist thinking stimulates a new critical awareness that encourages many female artists, curators and art historians to rethink their role in society, life and art.

Starting from a symbolic date, 1978, the year in which Mirella Bentivoglio presents more than 80 female artists at the exhibition “Materializzazione del linguaggio” on the occasion of the 38th Venice Biennale, the catalogue rereads the decade to focus on the close link between artistic practice and feminism. The stories and artworks of the female protagonists of that season testify to the emergence in the scene of history of a new subject (an unexpected subject) that, interrupting “the monologue of patriarchal culture”, nally manages to manifest itself.