HELSINKI.- In 2025, Kiasma will present four solo exhibitions alongside a new thematic collection exhibition. In March, Monira Al Qadiri will open her first solo show in the Nordic countries. That will be followed by the biggest institutional solo exhibition to date by Berlin-based Finnish artist Dafna Maimon. Towards the end of the year, Kiasma will have the pleasure of hosting Sarah Lucas’ first solo appearance in the Nordic countries, as well as a show by Finnish artist Essi Kuokkanen, which concludes our exhibition year.

Rock, Paper, Scissors
Kiasma Collection Exhibition
February 14, 2025–January 18, 2026

An artwork always exists in relation to material and physical reality. Kiasma’s collection exhibition examines the manifold meanings of materials, questions of authorship and technology, and different modes of perception. The materiality of the exhibition works also offers perspectives on current social and cultural phenomena, and on our living environment. The exhibition juxtaposes classic works of contemporary art from the Finnish National Gallery’s collection with new acquisitions. It includes works by Donald Judd, Pearla Pigao, Nina Roos, Man Yau, and Tarik Kiswanson, among others.

Monira Al Qadiri
March 21–September 7, 2025

Monira Al Qadiri (b. 1983) grew up in Kuwait. Childhood memories of petro-culture in the Persian Gulf region have been a major influence on her artistic practice, in which oil is a source not only of planetary crisis, but also of wealth. Her giant floating sculptures shaped like petrochemical-derived molecules, huge oil-drill bits slowly spinning in place, and series of video works reflect our complex relationship with petroleum. These visually captivating works glow with rainbow colours like patches of oil or glistening pearls. Pearl diving was a major source of livelihood in the region before the oil boom—another recurrent theme in Al Qadiri’s works that connects the present to the past.

Monira Al Qadiri is one of the most important contemporary artists in the Gulf region. She was born in Senegal, grew up in Kuwait, and studied in Japan. She currently lives and works in Berlin.

Dafna Maimon
April 25–September 21, 2025

Dafna Maimon (b. 1982) works with performance, video and drawing. Her fictional and semi-autobiographical, performative and cinematic narratives explore stereotypes, trauma and abjection.

In Maimon’s often collaboratively created works the subject is more often we than I. Instead of the individual experience, she looks at structures and communities, deconstructing patriarchal society and the Western obsession with reason. In her recent output, embodied knowledge and the body as the vessel for the human narrative are put under scrutiny and approached via somatic research. Absurd stagings of the everyday, often exaggerated and humorous, seek to reconnect with bodily being, and hence become tools for self-reflection, and even catharsis. The Kiasma exhibition premieres a new commissioned work pairing 3-channel video with a musical performance at Kiasma Theatre, while giving an overview of her earlier video works, installations and drawings.

Maimon was born in Finland, is based in Berlin, and is currently on an artist residency in Tammisaari, Finland.

Sarah Lucas
October 10, 2025–March 1, 2026

Over the course of three decades, Sarah Lucas (b. 1962, London) has become recognised as one of Britain’s most significant contemporary artists. Spanning sculpture, photography and installation, her work has consistently been characterised by irreverent humour and the use of everyday “readymade” objects—furniture, food, tabloid newspapers, tights, toilets, cigarettes—to conjure up corporeal fragments. The body—in its many guises—is Lucas’s prevailing subject.

In the 1990s she placed herself at the heart of her work in a series of photographic self-portraits. These images’ disarming mixture of vulnerability and attitudinising set the double-edged tone of much of the artist’s subsequent work.

Essi Kuokkanen
October 10, 2025–March 1, 2026

In Essi Kuokkanen’s (b. 1991) paintings, thoughts and feelings take on physical, embodied form. Emotion is expressed as flowing tears or drops of sweat streaming from the pores in skin. In her paintings and drawings, everything is connected as if in a dream, and the boundaries between plants, humans and animals evaporate. Other beings, such as a tearful banana or a heavy cloud, also make an appearance. The relationships depicted are mostly contradictory: good intentions can turn into their opposite; a helping gesture ends up causing chaos; or the carer becomes the one needing care.

Kuokkanen describes her working method as a circular movement, in which images, painting and text turn into one another and into something strange. She lives and works in Helsinki.