HELSINKI, FINLAND.- Kunsthalle Helsinki presents Acceleration: Maria Duncker – Timo Heino – Kaisu Koivisto, on view through May 15, 2005. This is a joint exhibition featuring work by three prominent Finnish artists, Maria Duncker, Timo Heino and Kaisu Koivisto. The exhibition works represent the artists' latest production, featuring photographs, videos, sculpture, collage and installations. The works investigate ordinary emotions: love and lovelessness, building and decay, people's contact with their environment, their encounter with the flood of information. According to the artists, the title of the exhibition, Acceleration, "is an apt description of our age, which is characterised by acceleration with no utopias, but also by a zest for life."

The exhibition consists of three independent entities, each presenting the production of one artist. Maria Duncker (b. 1963) presents video installations on the theme of emotional states. Emotions run wild in the videos, with love, loneliness and togetherness indulged in and put to the test. In Homecoming, a stone creature searches for a place among others like it. Fritsut eli Love Bites depicts the ritualistic branding of the loved one by biting and sucking on their skin the image of a heart or the words "don't ever leave me".

In Timo Heino's (b. 1962) installation Insect Collection the walls of the gallery are covered with newspaper ads for used cars. The dimensions of the room, together with the innumerable images of tiny cars and the simple, lucid colours on the newsprint, creates an airy, even floating impression. As Pauline von Bonsdorff describes the work in the exhibition catalogue: " From an aerial perspective human cities undeniably look like they are inhabited by cars, not people, and the life in them in a way looks like the life in an ants’ nest, equally purposeful and incomprehensible.

The works by Kaisu Koivisto (b. 1962) include sculptures and photos from her series Satakunta Constructivism which she has been creating since 2000. Both the sculptures and the photos depict changes in our environment, such as construction and decay. Koivisto's part of the exhibition combines a systematic structure and the proliferating, ornamental world of natural shapes and materials: an order slowly decaying into a seeming chaos.

The exhibition is supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, Greta and William Lehtinen Foundation, Arts Council of Finland, Foundation for Swedish Culture in Finland, City of Helsinki Cultural and Library Committee, Arts Council of Uusimaa, Finnish Fine Arts Academy Foundation and AVEK. A lavishly illustrated catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition, with text by Pauline von Bonsdorff and Pirjetta Brander. The graphic design of the book is by Sami Kortemäki. Acceleration will also be shown at the Lönnström Art Museum in Rauma, Finland, from 11 June to 25 September 2005.