Kirpilä Studio is a curated online gallery. Artists invited to participate in the project are encouraged to engage with Juhani Kirpilä’s unique art collection and the atmospheric environment of the museum—exploring the space both through its architecture and curated collection, as well as its history as a private residence.

The first artist featured in Kirpilä Studio is photographer Sandra Kantanen (b. 1974), who created a collage-like triptych titled Ikkuna (Window) during spring 2025. In Kantanen’s work, the private home and public museum, art and nature, past and present enter into a new kind of dialogue.

Kantanen’s practice delicately weaves together photography, painting, and digital techniques. Her works inhabit the borderlands between dream and reality, exploring landscape both as an inner experience and as an aesthetic form. In her new series, Kantanen approached Juhani Kirpilä’s collection in a poetic and deeply personal way, layering elements of home, landscape, and memory. She describes her working process as follows:

 “The three-part series Ikkuna (Window) explores Juhani Kirpilä, his home, and his love for art. As a visual artist, I’m inspired by the idea that there are people who find happiness through art. I’ve created excerpts – or windows – into the world beyond, surrounding them with fragments gathered from the collector’s home. They form a kind of altar to art, or a collector’s view. Carpets take flight, and the outlines of houseplants bring nature indoors. I’ve taken liberties with the collection works: altered them to my liking, removed and added elements. I hope the late artists don’t take offense!”

Sandra Kantanen’s work was recently exhibited at Saatchi Gallery in London as part of the group exhibition Flowers – Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture, and is on view until August 24 as part of Blur / Obscure / Distort: Photography and Perception at the Norton Museum of Art in Florida. Discover more about Sandra Kantanen here.

Jonna Kina’s Secret Words and Related Stories video work will be on display at the Kirpilä Art Collection from October 24 to November 17, 2024. The work consists of anonymously collected passwords and the stories behind them, exploring the concept of security and personal “secrets” in contemporary society. By examining these passwords, the work unravels how security connects to identity—how passwords act as compressed fragments of language, encoding physical history and memory to access various services in the virtual world.

In the video, young actors aged 12 to 16 stand against a red backdrop, reading from sheets of paper, narrating personal confessions, childhood memories, and clichéd rationalizations tied to these passwords. These stories are, at turns, thoughtful, humorous, and emotional, transforming simple chosen words into windows that reveal personal information—the very opposite of a password’s intended function.

On the opening night, Thursday, October 24, actors Johannes Holopainen and Alina Tomnikov will perform (in Finnish) two readings at 5:00 PM and 7:00 PM, presenting true stories behind passwords anonymously shared with artist Jonna Kina. These stories reflect the tension between public and private, as the passwords, originally created to protect, often disclose deeply personal memories or references. Admission to both the exhibition and the opening performance is free.

Jonna Kina (b. 1984) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, and Aalto University’s School of Arts, Design and Architecture. Her works have been widely exhibited internationally in in international exhibitions and festivals such as the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Berlinale Forum Expanded Cinema Program in Berlin, Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Galleria delle Carrozze di Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence, Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, and at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). Kina’s film Arr. for a Scene was awarded Best Nordic Short Film at Nordisk Panorama in 2017, and that same year, she was nominated for the VISIO Young Talent Acquisition Prize in Florence. Kina has participated in the Finnish Cultural Foundation’s residency program twice: in 2023 at the Fabrikken residency in Denmark, and in 2018 at Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS).

Jonna Kina: Secret Words and Related Stories at the Kirpilä Art Collection during museum opening hours, October 24–November 17, 2024.

Still image: Jonna Kina, Secret Words and Related Stories, 2013–2016, 4K, 20 min 12 sec

From November 2023, Artor Jesus Inkerö will open gateways into other spaces from the Kirpilä Art Collection. The chandeliers in Inkerö’s exhibition Trophy will become doubled on the ceiling of the gallery’s ‘everyday living room’, while rugged ceramic sculptures provide a stark contrast to the collection’s porcelains.

The exhibition includes works previously unseen in Finland: Short Reach (2019), which was filmed in Amsterdam, and ceramics from the My Hard Core installation (2021), seen at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. The finishing touch is a new series of photographs entitled Big Ass (2023), whose inspirations are the artist’s own body and queer gym aesthetics.

“When the Kirpilä Art Collection’s space was transformed from a home into an art gallery, it underwent a similar neutralisation process to that of the Oude Kerk, where I shot Short Reach: there, religious elements were removed from the church because it is currently mostly used for other purposes. In my mind, these spaces combine to be one and the same,” Inkerö explains.

Although contemporary art exhibitions have been held at Kirpilä since 2017, Inkerö’s Trophy is the first-ever solo show to take place there.

“We are interested to see what interpretations of the gallery and its collections the artist can come up with. Our home-like environment offers many opportunities for presenting art, and in Inkerö’s case it is fascinating to see how their works simultaneously merge into the space and wrestle against harmony,” says museum director Johanna Ruohonen.

Artor Jesus Inkerö (b. 1989) is a Finnish visual artist, whose works have been seen at the New Museum in New York, Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, NOON Projects gallery in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki and SALTS gallery in Basel. Inkerö has worked in residence at London’s Somerset House and Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. The themes that Inkerö processes through their exhibitions, performances, public artworks and projects are questions related to queer identity and society.

The Kirpilä Art Collection is an art museum maintained by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, presenting modern Finnish art collection of Dr Juhani Kirpilä (1931−1988) in the collector’s former home.

Inkerö is currently working under a two-year grant from the Finnish Cultural Foundation. They have also received funding from the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, the Saastamoinen Foundation and the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux.

Artor Jesus Inkerö, Trophy, Kirpilä Art Collection, 29 November 2023 − 3 March 2024. Open to the public free of charge, 2 pm–6 pm on Wednesdays and 2 pm–4 pm on Sundays. Group visits are also available by arrangement at other times.

Guided tours will be conducted by the artist in Finnish at 1:30 pm on Sunday 3 December and Sunday 4 February, and in English at 3 pm on Sunday 4 February. Free entry.

Caption: Artor Jesus Inkerö, 2019, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, the Netherlands