The theme of this year’s Helsinki Biennial is ‘Shelter’, which reflects the political tensions in the region. Finland shares a 1,340km-long border with Russia, and in 2023 it joined NATO in response to its neighbour’s invasion of Ukraine. There have been efforts to renovate the country’s Cold War bomb shelters, and households have been encouraged to stockpile food in case of an emergency.
However, the curators are less interested in geopolitics than in climate change. The phenomenon known as ‘Arctic amplification’ — which has seen the Arctic warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet since 1979 — is raising average temperatures more quickly in Scandinavia than anywhere else in the world. Finland’s summers are lengthening, and its winters are getting wetter. As deforestation accelerates, biodiversity is rapidly declining.
The scale of the crisis has led to a psychological state known as ‘solastalgia’, a paralysing sense of helplessness in the face of environmental degradation. Unusually, this distress seems to have energised the curators Blanca de la Torre and Kati Kivinen. They argue that now, more than ever, society needs to face up to impending ecological catastrophe and move beyond our human-centric perspective. The 37 artists participating in this year’s biennial have been asked to imagine worlds ‘beyond human realities’. Vallisaari, a habitat for rare species, is the prime example of what happens when the people leave and nature takes over.