In the Helsinki archipelago, as the days stretched toward the midsummer sun, birds were my consistent companions. Gulls circled overhead as I rode the ferry to Vallisaari. On this island, a former military stronghold uninhabited since the 1990s, clusters of barnacle geese seemed to outnumber the roaming visitors who, like me, had arrived to view the newly opened exhibition. As we gathered in a worn wooden shed for an artist talk, starlings fluttered through the rafters as human speech intermingled with birdsong.
The third iteration of the Helsinki Biennial opened to the public on June 8. The organization has, since its inaugural iteration in 2021, made a public commitment to sustainability, and it remains mindful of its carbon footprint—a rarity in the world of mega-exhibitions. Titled Shelter: Below and Beyond, Becoming and Belonging, this year’s exhibition was curated by Kati Kivinen, Helsinki Art Museum’s curator of exhibitions, and Blanca de la Torre, artistic director of Ideology of Sustainability & Laboratory of Art in Madrid. The curatorial framework addresses ecological entanglements by inviting artists to “foreground non-human actors . . . as protagonists,” including minerals, animals, plants, or the elements themselves. An emphasis on the more-than-human world has increasingly been gaining traction in the art world as a means of reckoning with the escalating planetary climate emergency. And certainly, while the more-than-human is undeniably a “protagonist” throughout Shelter, how the curators or individual artists chose to make it so remains contentious. What are the ethics or best practices of working with more-than-human networks? How does one move from the instrumentalization of the nonhuman to a reciprocal relationship, let alone collaboration?
Laura Põld, Külmking. Resting Within Puddles and Branches, 2025, detail. Photo by Maija Toivanen, courtesy HAM / Helsinki Biennial.
Variations of these questions swirled through the panel conversations organized as a part of the two-day preview. Several artists rightfully noted the inescapable contradictions, since human contributions within the contemporary art context inherently reaffirm an anthropocentric viewpoint. Others reflected on their shared desire to find new forms of artistic practice that support more-than-human flourishing on Vallisaari, a protected nature reserve and the largest biennial venue. Estonian artist Laura Põld spoke about her site-sensitive commission Külmking. Resting Within Puddles and Branches (2025), wherein a group of subtly abstracted ceramic tree trunks serve as rainwater receptacles for local birds to drink and bathe in. She noted that bringing ceramic work outdoors—something she had never done before—involved a necessary surrender of control, and she described the thrill of witnessing various insects and arachnids swiftly embrace the work.
In addition to addressing the limits and potentials of nonanthropocentric art-making, the panel conversations underscored a gap between the biennial’s rhetoric and curatorial choices. In one panel discussion, artist Tue Greenfort directly asked the curators about their lack of engagement with local activist organizations already working to demand change. Greenfort acknowledged that shifts in the realm of storytelling and ideas are important but must be grounded in action and reaction. The curators notably did not engage with the artist’s critique, which he reiterated once more later in the session. Artist Juan Zamora picked up this thread in his own way during a subsequent panel discussion, referring to the local chapter of Extinction Rebellion—a group whose demands include ending excessive logging, protecting biodiversity, and eliminating environmentally harmful subsidies—which held a demonstration in central Helsinki on June 5, the first day of the preview. By not amplifying the work of like-minded local activists and not engaging with Greenfort’s and Zamora’s concerns, the curators effectively curtailed the reach of the biennial’s engagement with climate change.
I was also disappointed to encounter artworks that fell short of the biennial’s stated aims, merely illustrating, representing, aestheticizing, or anthropomorphizing nonhumans rather than deeply considering interspecies cohabitation. Two large-scale loaned works by Yayoi Kusama and Giuseppe Penone—a vibrantly painted “human-size” aluminum flower and a thirty-nine-foot bronze tree holding a granite sphere, respectively—were visually arresting, but they both struck me as one-note sculptures that would have been carbon intensive to ship and install. I imagine the inclusion of these spectacular, highly produced sculptures adds to the climate optimism and levity that the curators made reference to during the preview days, articulating a desire to counter the default pessimism that often dominates conversations about the climate crisis and contributes to fear and inaction. While encouraging curiosity does often inspire productive public engagement, it’s possible to do so without participating in the dominant global systems that produced the climate crisis. Contemporary art has the potential to contribute greatly to cultural discourse around climate change, yet too often this contribution itself causes environmental damage.
Yayoi Kusama, Flowers that Bloom Tomorrow, 2011. Helsinki Art Museum. Photo: HAM / Helsinki Biennial / Sonja Hyytiäinen.
I have a long-standing interest in how practitioners choose to navigate the unavoidable tensions involved with climate-conscious art-making and curating, and how they mitigate the art world’s negative environmental effects. This is a priority in my own curatorial practice. While there are certainly some universally applicable best practices—keeping carbon-intensive shipping at a minimum, prioritizing local production, responsibly sourcing materials, avoiding single-use materials in exhibition design—each exhibition presents unique challenges, especially given the case-by-case decision-making required for site-responsive artwork. I was consumed by the difficulty of these considerations as I worked alongside my cocurators to develop the 2019 and 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art and imagine possible measures for accountability and responsibility.
Despite the moments of contradiction around Shelter, the Helsinki Biennial remains one of the more environmentally conscious curatorial undertakings that I have seen. The curators opted for fewer artists—thirty-seven in total—than a typical biennial, and Kivinen and La Torre included older works by the same artists alongside new commissions, giving viewers a stronger sense of an artist’s practice. Going deeper with fewer artists also helps visitors experience the exhibition’s core themes regardless of whether they make it to all three venues—notable given that two sites, Helsinki Art Museum and Esplanadi park, are centrally located on the mainland but access to Vallisaari is limited. For instance, Gediminas Urbonas’s Unmelting Black (Snowman 1:1), a Karelian black-granite sculpture from 1995, was moved from its permanent home in the Pikku Huopalahti district of Helsinki to Esplanadi, while on Vallisaari, his more recent collaboration with his wife, artist Nomeda Urbonas, titled Futurity Island (2018), employed peatland-drainage pipes and a soundscape based on field recordings of larvae—showing how one artist’s relationship to local materials has become more attuned to ecological realities over time.
Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas: Futurity island, 2018-25. Photo by Sonja Hyytiäinen, courtesy HAM / Helsinki Biennial.
Carola Grahn, Vearalden Olmai, 2023/25. Photo by Sonja Hyytiäinen, courtesy HAM / Helsinki Biennial.
Vallisaari has been a central feature of the biennial since the exhibition’s inception. It continues to offer a unique context for artworks, nestled as it is within the broader archipelago, slowly being reclaimed by abundant flora and fauna in a process of unintentional rewilding. The strongest projects on the island come from artists whose material practices reflect their attunement to the specific environment and interspecies entanglement. South Sámi artist Carola Grahn’s work Vearalden Olmai (2023) is a three-dimensional recreation of a structure depicted on the drumskin of an ancient Sámi instrument. It consists of simple birch logs, with reindeer horns protruding from the sculpture’s roof. Grahn’s title comes from a celestial Sámi deity who protects and maintains the cosmos, and the sacred drum that the work is modeled after is one of few surviving pieces of irreplaceable cultural heritage: a ritual object and emblem of the Sámi belief system. The sculpture appears as an integrated part of the surrounding forest, serving as a reminder that we are always already in dialogue with the more-than-human world and spiritual realm through long-standing practices of storytelling and material culture.
A number of artworks in the biennial’s third edition highlight resonances across global movements for environmental and social justice, made possible by the presence of international artists who demonstrate how disparate geographies are navigating questions of the nonhuman—this third iteration includes more artists from the Global South than previous editions, with a contingent of artists from Latin America. Peruvian artist Ana Teresa Barboza’s standout commission, Interwoven Stories (2025), employs a material practice of Indigenous communities of the Amazonian rainforest. Barboza wove together strips of bark from yanchama trees in Peru with strips of birch bark from Finnish forests, bringing together two disparate but related ecosystems—since both materials are used in vernacular handcrafting traditions to make textiles, functional objects, or shelters. Situated in a stone building on Valisaari that was once a Finnish artillery battery, the installation resembles an abstracted forest, with the scents of birch and yanchama bark filling the cool air.
Ana Teresa Barboza, Interwoven Stories, 2025, detail. Photo by Sonja Hyytiäinen, courtesy HAM / Helsinki Biennial.
While Barboza’s installation underscores commonalities across borders, work by the collective nabbteeri, formed by Finnish artists Janne Nabb and Maria Teeri, reflects how global concerns play out locally. nabbteeri are self-described scavengers who work with materials found on-site. For their contribution a suitable host, they collected fallen branches, dead perennials, and other locally gathered plants, which they mounted to the exterior of the island’s dilapidated schoolhouse, a building that was deemed unfit for inhabitation in the 1980s due to toxic actinomyces. The plant matter forms an impenetrable layer that mimics the protective mechanisms of camouflage or self-defense while providing a refuge for the island’s diverse nonhuman inhabitants. The evocative and unusual transformation makes the building look like a massive sea urchin or porcupine. The foraged vegetation includes species introduced to the island by humans during its military past, including Turkish warty-cabbage and hoary alyssum. nabbteeri’s installation also reveals the very recent past, when, during the biennial’s inaugural iteration, Katharina Grosse used the schoolhouse as the surface for her painting Shutter Splinter (2021), covering the structure with brightly colored paint. Along the foundation, glimmers of Grosse’s orange, blue, and purple still show through.
As demonstrated by the porosity between nabbteeri’s and Grosse’s biennial contributions, the artists and curators are resisting the tendency to start from scratch. The dominant paradigm of biennial-making involves wiping the slate clean between editions and framing each as a discrete entity. This mindset itself fuels the never-ending proliferation of biennials, which contributes to the globalized art world’s fundamental lack of sustainability in recent decades and its continued acceleration of production and insatiable appetite for large-scale artworks. Allowing artwork from previous editions to leak through, as the Helsinki Biennial’s curators have done, pushes against this paradigm and facilitates more intentional forms of production.
nabbteeri, a suitable host, 2025, detail. Photo by Sonja Hyytiäinen, courtesy HAM / Helsinki Biennial.
In her 2022 book, Curating in a Time of Ecological Crisis: Biennales as Agents of Change, Felicity Fenner writes about how biennial curators have extended their duty of care beyond artworks to the ecosystems that enable their creation. Ultimately, the biennial or festival model, with its various contradictions, remains an adaptable form of exhibition-making because, more than most institutions, it affords curators the flexibility to respond to specific conditions of their environment. This was true of my experience on the inaugural curatorial team of the Toronto Biennial. Candice Hopkins, Tairone Bastien, and I were engaged to work across two editions, which enabled us to slow down the process of working with artists, partners, and sites. And we were able to work with artists on new commissions over an extended period of four years, instead of rushing intensive productions.
This fluidity between editions was likewise embraced through the 2020 and 2022 Biennale of Sydney. Despite being led by two different curators, Brook Andrew and José Roca, the two editions were deeply connected and interrelated, both engaging with interdisciplinary practitioners and global First Nations communities to address the entanglement of cultural and environmental sustainability. Both editions featured works that stretched beyond the bounds of the two-year cycle. For instance, Andrew’s commission of Kim Williams and Lucas Ihlein’s Plastic Free Biennale brought the two in as artists-as-consultants who intervened in environmental policies and practices across every level of the festival, with the intention of creating changes that would last beyond a single edition.
Kalle Hamm & Dzamil Kamanger, Bug Rugs, 2025, detail. Photo by Henni Hyvärinen, courtesy HAM / Helsinki Biennial.
Since the first iteration of the Helsinki Biennial, the organization has committed to producing a detailed impact report on its successes and shortcomings with regard to environmental sustainability. For most cultural organizations, impact reports tend to focus exclusively on metrics such as visitor numbers and the effects on tourism and local economies. The Helsinki Biennial’s report addresses how waste, material purchases, energy consumption, logistics, and mobility relate to its stated objectives. While a follow-up report from the second edition is not yet available, this approach commendably attributes data to a form of exhibition-making that is typically as opaque as it is wasteful. It is exceedingly rare for an organization to not only track but publicly share something like energy consumption. However, this document also reveals certain omissions in the organization’s definition of sustainability. I was disappointed to see what appears to be conventional vinyl for didactics and signage when so many eco-friendly alternatives exist, and waste calculations exclude volumes that result from the dismantling of the event. From my experience in biennial production, deinstallation is when the true cost of exhibition-making is laid bare, regardless of a curator’s intentions.
Yet the organization has made a concerted effort to find permanent homes for more resource-intensive new commissions, some of which are intended from the outset to remain in place as part of the City of Helsinki’s growing public-art collection. This year, major works by Olafur Eliasson and Sara Bjarland become permanent fixtures. A lack of consideration for what I think of as “end-of-life care” for site-specific biennial commissions creates significant yet rarely visible waste. During the preview tour, artists Kalle Hamm and Dzamil Kamanger presented their installation Bug Rugs (2025) in Esplanadi. I was pleasantly surprised when they explained that they had also secured permanent homes for these works, four large-scale insect hotels made from timber sourced under the supervision of the new ecological-forestry-certification organization AEFC and embellished with salvaged conifer cones, reeds, and terra-cotta collected and assembled with students from local high schools. After the biennial closes in September, the insect hotels will go to AEFC and these schools. This means that, excitingly, long after these works have concluded their “public” lives as part of Shelter, they will serve as literal shelter for a critical more-than-human community. There is no singular answer to the question of how contemporary artists should work with the nonhuman world, especially as we navigate the conditions of climate collapse. But this work by Hamm and Kamanger elegantly yet practically compensates for biodiversity loss, prioritizing local partnerships and sustainable materials. This is perhaps where the Helsinki Biennial truly shines: through those artists who take up the challenge of “staying with the trouble” (to quote Donna Haraway) in how they collaborate with their environment. However imperfect, messy, or contradictory, they strive to acknowledge ecological loss, develop a sense of “response-ability,” and are moving forward.
