Sculpture Expanded

From downtown to Vuosaari, 10 artists are ready to change the urban landscape of Helsinki – get ready for mutated fruits and augmented reality

The Association of Finnish Sculptors will launch a truly unique exhibition event in Helsinki in summer 2019. Sculpture Expanded – Moving Laboratory of Public Art is a major public art project during which the urban space will become a laboratory for movable works of art.

An international jury selected 10 artists to produce a work for the Moving Laboratory from a total of 140 applications: artist couple Andy Best and Merja Puustinen, artist groups Forest Camp and Pagan, and artists Anna-Kaisa Ant-Wuorinen, Timo Heino, Shoji Kato, Le Hien Minh (Vietnam), Riikka Puronen, Pia Sirén and Denise Ziegler. The open call resulted in 40 applications from abroad and the rest were submitted by artists and groups of artists working in Finland.

Sculpture Expanded brings temporary public art in the cityscape of Helsinki. The works and the events linked to them being moved around will bring joy and in addition the project will offer urban residents new points of view to their surroundings. Furthermore, the project highlights the diversity of contemporary sculpture.

Andy Best and Merja Puustinen’s installation Strange Fruit will be attached to buildings in the form of inflatable, mutated fruits in spring 2019. Multidisciplinary art group Pagan presents a work that utilizes augmented reality; a cocooned organism called Chrysalis growing under the city of Helsinki.

As well as being a physical object, a sculpture can be immaterial or social. Eau de Sculptur by Riikka Puronen invites the viewers to sculpt with the power of thought. Timo Heino’s, Shoji Kato’s and artist group Forest Camp’s works will appear in the city only briefly at a time. 

In the Moving Laboratory, the works will change place a number of times during the event from May to September 2019. Feedback from the audience will be collected throughout the summer. Sculpture Expanded will expand from the city centre to suburbs of Tapulinkaupunki, Vuosaari and Malminkartano. The places are chosen in cooperation with the artists and the Culture and Leisure and Urban Environment Divisions of the City of Helsinki.

Sculpture Expanded will polish the profile of Helsinki as a city of visual arts. It is the largest sculpture event in Helsinki in many years. The project is supported by HAM, Helsinki Art Museum and City of Helsinki, Culture and Leisure Division.

The project has been awarded a Taide2 grant from the Finnish Cultural Foundation.