Helsinki Biennial 2025: Shelter

ON SOURCE: Helsinki Biennial 2025

Helsinki Biennial 2025

Shelter: Below and Beyond, Becoming and Belonging

The third Helsinki Biennial seeks to shake us out of anthropocentrism in order to better understand the delicate and severely imbalanced relationship between humankind and nature. The curatorial concept questions human dominance by foregrounding non-human actors such as plants, animals, fungi, elements and minerals. The curators believe this shift in perspective can foster new awareness and compassion for other living beings. By displacing the anthropocentric gaze, we aim to discover a plurality of ways to sense and mediate experiences that embrace the ecosystem.

The third edition of the biennial is titled Shelter. The title and theme were strongly inspired by one of the main venues of the biennial, the Vallisaari island, which has been free of human habitation for decades. For us, the island represents a form of shelter – a rich ecosystem surrounded by the sea that has been left to its own devices without active human intervention for a long time. The protected island, located close to the heart of the city, is one of the region’s most diverse in terms of flora and is also home to numerous bat, butterfly, and other insect species. Today, the island, with its long history of military use, offers the opportunity to imagine what unfolds when humans leave the stage and non-human actors remain.

The third edition of Helsinki Biennial envisions art as a source of shelter and compassion, both conceptually and physically. With animals, plants, insects, minerals as their protagonists, the artworks employ various interspecies perspectives in exploring the significance of nonhuman actors to the wellbeing of our shared planet. Also highlighted are Indigenous narratives, which convey knowledge that can foster a more sustainable and holistic relationship with the environment and all its inhabitants.

Against the backdrop of the global environmental crisis and climate emergency, Helsinki Biennial 2025 draws attention to the urgent need for new ways of thinking that holistically consider the wider impact of human actions on the wellbeing of the planet. The approaches taken by the featured artists vary from microscopic scrutiny of non-human realities to wider speculative reimagining of possible futures.  Shelter fully manifests the power of art to create new agencies and propose alternate realities.

Helsinki Biennial 2025 seeks to forge new spaces of protection and inspire positive environmental action. By laying down guidelines on environmental actions and engendering awareness of nature’s delicate balance, the biennial’s systemic sustainability plan marks a conscious attempt to bridge the gap between theory and practice – not only does the biennial propose alternative realities, but also proactively strives to make them materialize.

ON SOURCE: Helsinki Biennial 2025