On Being-With the World: Relational Curating as Practice

When I visited the Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection for the first time, what struck me most was the richness of its composition: modernist and contemporary, Finnish and international artworks coming into dialogue within the collection.

Encountering more than 3,000 artworks at once was both remarkable and challenging, especially when given the freedom to shape one’s own research direction. Over several weeks of observing and analysing the collection, and through conversations with colleagues, art historians, and artists in Helsinki, I began to notice certain tendencies: an ever-growing presence of international artists alongside Finnish ones; an increasing openness towards international artistic practices; and a diversification of artistic media, as well as discursive and aesthetic strategies.

Observing these developments, I began to reflect on how collections emerge, grow, and mature over time. How do different elements within a collection relate to one another, forming a more complex, living body? Tracing these relations among artworks, as well as their connections to the public life in which they are embedded, has become the central focus of my research.

Having worked for some time on the concept of relationality — as developed in feminist theory, posthumanism, decolonial philosophy, and Indigenous thought — as a curatorial and artistic methodology, I therefore approach the artworks not as autonomous objects, but understand the Collection as a field of relations: between local and international practices, between human and more-than-human agencies, and between artworks and the historical conditions from which they emerge.

How can we make sense of contemporary artistic practices in a world shaped by rapid technological, political, material, and epistemic transformation? And most importantly, why is it necessary to situate our understanding of artistic practices within the historical moment from which they emerge? How does art relate to the world and to life itself?

To formulate a framework of relationality, we first need to look beyond the artworks themselves. Before focusing on the microscopic details of each work, it is necessary to zoom out and consider a broader field of knowledge in an interdisciplinary way.

The notion of relationality is not a new Western philosophical idea. It remains present in many Indigenous cultures as a cosmological principle. In modern Western thought, relationality resurfaced in the 1980s and 1990s as a critique of the atomism of modernity, particularly in the work of feminist, post-structuralist, and postcolonial thinkers. This development also builds on earlier contributions by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the 1970s, who introduced concepts such as the rhizome, immanence, and assemblage.

 

More recently, the concept has been further developed and expanded by thinkers such as Karen Barad, through her notion of intra-action and agential realism; Donna Haraway, through the concept of worlding-with; Marisol de la Cadena, Mario Blaser and Arturo Escobar, in their articulation of pluriversality and Indigenous cosmopolitics; and Bruno Latour, through Actor–Network Theory, among many others.

In this sense, relationality is not simply a form of connectivity between separate entities, but a profound onto-epistemological reworking of knowledge. No being precedes the relations that constitute it, and every element exists, both materially and discursively, only in relation to others.

 

The modern Cartesian divide between subject and object has produced a hierarchical binary in which one side is marked as active, rational, alive, and dominant, and the other as passive, irrational, and subject to domination. This construct has epistemically enabled the exploitation of what is positioned on the object side: the feminised, the natural, the primitive, the foreign, the non-living. At the same time, it has sought to erase or render unintelligible everything that exists between these categories.

In The History of Sexuality and Madness and Civilisation, Michel Foucault shows how institutions of knowledge and power produce such binaries, shaping subjecthood and disciplining reality into fixed categories (Foucault 1978; 1988). These divisions, such as normal/perverse or reason/madness, render any nuance between them epistemically non-existent.

But these divides cannot withstand the onto-epistemology of relationality, where the knower or subject is inseparable from the known or object, all embedded within the world and constantly co-constituting one another. This relational paradigm therefore causes the collapse of such divides. Knowledge becomes embodied, situated, and multiple, and this multiplicity replaces the single perspectivity of the modern knower, who has claimed to stand outside history.

The consequence is an anti-Oedipal return to the body and a politics of immanence, a refusal of innocence and of the original myth of unity, and an opening of a field of possibilities for a world where many worlds fit.

Seemingly an abstract philosophical concept, relationality carries a set of ethical and political implications with direct effects on our everyday lives and on how we shape the world we inhabit. At the level of world-building, the objective gaze has set the ground for extractivist policies that have caused irreversible ecological damage; when nature is treated as a dead object, it can be plundered.

The colonisation and enslavement of humans would not have been possible without the justifications provided by the pseudo-science of race, which placed enslaved people on the object side of this binary. The objectification of women over centuries is another consequence of such a divide.

But how do these concepts affect the making and understanding of art? And how might this, in turn, shape life itself? I believe contemporary artworks offer a particularly fertile site for this investigation, not simply as objects to be interpreted, but as situations in which relations between bodies, technologies, environments, histories, and forms of knowledge are created and negotiated. The following case studies do not aim to illustrate theory, but to examine how relationality becomes materially and aesthetically operative within artistic practice. Read together, these works form a constellation of approaches through which relational thinking becomes perceptible in the Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection.

Looking through the archive of the collection, The Hour of Prayer, a four-channel video from 2005 by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, immediately catches my attention. An autobiographical work, The Hour of Prayer is a tale of loss, grief, and interspecies attachment. It narrates the story of the protagonist’s dog dying during a winter storm in New York, and ends eleven months later in Benin.

Since the very start of her career, Ahtila has tested the limits of a single-perspective understanding of the world. Her works reflect not only on the human condition, but also on our relation to space, time, othered bodies, and the medium itself. She actively challenges the limits of the medium, breaking with the canons of filmic representation in order to stage subjectivity and interiority under strain. Emotionally charged and psychologically interior, Ahtila’s works create an affective architecture, inviting the viewer into a fractured mental and emotional space in which the medium increasingly and self-consciously becomes the message.

Through multiplying viewpoints and refusing a single point of entry into her narrative, Ahtila destabilises the constructed objective paradigm of modernity and creates an affective space of subjectivity, suggesting how reality might be perceived by her protagonist. As Donna Haraway writes: “This is the constructed gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. This is the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere.” (Haraway, 1988)

But in this work, Ahtila does more than multiply viewpoints and render subjectivity visible. The lack of coherence in time and space within the installation invites the viewer into a dreamlike labyrinth of emotions and generates what Pier Paolo Pasolini (1976) has called cinema della poesia: a cinematic language opposed to the objectivity of the cinema of prose, using free indirect discourse to reflect the interiority of the subject, similar to the language of poetry.

This poetics develops further in a post-anthropocentric and post-humanist direction in The Horizontal (2011), where Ahtila marks a shift in her artistic strategies, moving away from human-centred narratives towards post-anthropocentric ones. In this six-channel video installation, we see a living spruce tree in its full length, laid horizontally across synchronised screens. The tree becomes the sole, silent protagonist of this post-anthropocentric drama.

Ahtila does not anthropomorphise the non-human here, but instead stages the impossibility of doing so, posing a question: how can a field of perception be created that allows a tree to be represented in its entirety, without reduction or distortion? She brings a life-sized digital representation of the tree into the exhibition space and lays it horizontally in order to make it fit. Through this subtle intervention, the work rebels against the conventions of representational Western art.

The invention of linear perspective in Western art in the early Renaissance did not simply offer a neutral and objective tool for representing space, but created a regime of vision that naturalised a single, fixed viewpoint as reality. By organising the world around this sovereign observer, perspective produced an illusion of realism in which singularity takes the place of multiplicity, and complexity is replaced by a coherent and legible geometric order. In this sense, perspective is not merely an aesthetic technique, but an epistemic technology.

Reading Erwin Panofsky is helpful here, as he clearly demonstrates the process through which the relational field of vision is transformed into a homogeneous and functional effect of reality through the intervention of geometric perspective:

“The ultimate basis of the homogeneity of geometric space is that all its elements, the ‘points’ which are joined in it, are mere determinations of position, possessing no independent content of their own outside of this relation, this position which they occupy in relation to each other. Their reality is exhausted in their reciprocal relation: it is a purely functional and not a substantial reality.” (Panofsky. E, 1991)

Ahtila dismantles this geometric construct by fragmenting the image and inverting the tree, thereby opening a relational visual field. In her most recent contribution to the collection, The Potentiality for Love (2018), she extends her exploration of multi-perspectivity and develops a framework that stages a worlding-with theatre for both human and other-than-human actors.

On one monitor, we see a primate sitting with its back to us, indifferent to our gaze. On the other side of the installation space, there is a table with another monitor, on which we see the primate’s hand. Nearby, a table invites us to place our own hand close to the primate’s digital hand, replicating a phantom limb experience.

In a phantom limb experiment, a prosthetic rubber hand is used to trick the brain into sensing a connection to a fake limb, while the real one is hidden. By providing synchronised visual and tactile feedback to the replica, the brain begins to perceive the rubber hand as part of the body and responds to it empathically. This method is used in mirror therapy to treat phantom pain, giving people with limb loss visual control over their missing limb.

Can the phantom primate hand evoke a sense of connection? Can we perceive the Other as a continuity of the self? Can empathy be extended across species? Here we sit, with a digitally mediated primate hand, witnessing and testing the potentiality for love — the most powerful form of relating empathically to another being.

In another corner of the exhibition space, a tall, asymmetrical LED screen shows the floating body of a woman moving weightlessly through the cosmos before finally arriving in front of us, opening her arms, her T-shirt bearing the word Love. As she comes nearer to us, her body annihilates into pixels. This pixelated body self-referentially unveils the presence of the medium and brings it to our attention.

The LED screen itself is incomplete, missing sections that prevent it from forming the usual rectangular shape, suggesting that our visual access is not total. Here, once again, technology is not merely a medium, but also the message (McLuhan, 1967).

By distributing the elements of the installation across the exhibition hall, Ahtila denies a single point of entry to her work spatially, thereby decentring a one-perspective gaze. She also maintains a sense of opacity, both by not using verbal language and by preventing the audience from arriving at a shared understanding or resolution of the work. The relations she creates do not homogenise perception, but instead establish conditions of coexistence and conviviality within the work.

This places the work in close dialogue with another piece in the collection, Pierre Huyghe’s Abyssal Plane (2015). The work consists of a cast of the lower half of a female nude, submerged in an aquarium inhabited by other life forms, such as a starfish. The concrete sculpture is a replica of a work from the 1930s by the Swiss artist Max Reinhold Weber. Huyghe previously used the cast at documenta 13 in 2012 as part of the work Untilled, where he replaced the head of the nude with a beehive.

Abyssal Plain: Geometry of the Immortals was originally conceived for the Istanbul Biennale, to be placed at the bottom of the Sea of Marmara as a site of regeneration and transformation, hidden from the gaze of spectators. The version in the Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection contains sea-floor sediments from the original site, along with starfish, an organism capable of regenerating itself even from a single remaining limb. Stem-like and pluripotent cells within the starfish can develop into new tissues, nerves, and muscles, allowing it to rebuild a missing limb or even its entire body.

While the starfish possesses this capacity for regeneration, any transformation of the replica — the cultural and art-historical element of the work — depends on the totality of the surrounding ecosystem and its living organisms. In other words, the artwork becomes alive only through its relation and proximity to other forms of life.

If Ahtila’s work, through the self-reflexivity of digital media, decentres the human gaze, Huyghe does so by activating matter as an agent within the work. Huyghe’s half figure does not operate within the aesthetic register that characterises sculptural works such as Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Although it replicates an earlier sculptural form by Max Reinhold Weber, it does not function primarily as a cultural object of contemplation or as a bearer of inherited art-historical value. Instead, it is operational: its status as an artwork emerges only when the half sculpture, the aquarium, and its living cohabitants coexist as an ecosystem, or a relational field. The work’s significance does not reside in representational or discursive attributes attached to the sculptural form, but in its total configuration as a living, sympoietic system.

Within this environment, the replica does not simply signify cultural memory; it becomes matter with its own ongoing historicity, entangled in processes that generate meaning. Matter is rendered active and is no longer reduced to a referent of meaning, thereby undermining one of modernity’s most fundamental assumptions: that meaning is imposed upon an inert world by human subjects.

Barad elaborates this dynamic understanding of materiality by conceptualising the mutual constitution of matter and meaning through “intra-action”, a process in which entities co-constitute one another and co-emerge.

“Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the ‘‘Other.’’ The intra-actively emergent ‘‘parts’’ of phenomena are co-constituted. Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin; the other is not just in one’s skin, but in one’s bones, in one’s belly, in one’s heart, in one’s nucleus, in one’s past and future.” (Barad, K. 2007)

This entanglement finds concrete instantiation in Huyghe’s work, where matter and meaning are inseparable, emerging only through the relational intra-actions of the sculpture, the living organisms, and the surrounding environment. Huyghe gives a certain field of relationality direction and a durational stage of visibility, allowing meaning to emerge through the participation of a multiplicity of actors. He distributes and shares authorship with non-human agents that participate in the creation of the work.

Abyssal Plane is simultaneously an object of art and a subject that regenerates itself, even when we look away. These are not ‘hysteric objects’, whose existence depends on our gaze, as Huyghe himself notes (Buscalferri and Hadelova, 2021). They are indifferent to our presence and exist with or without us, in the museum or at the bottom of the sea.

Rather than presenting an artwork encountered as a bounded object or a legible environment, Abyssal Plane is an evolving assemblage — an ecology of relations in which biological, geological, institutional, and fictional elements co-constitute one another and produce the very conditions of the work’s appearance, in a process that Haraway calls worlding-with:

“Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing. In the words of the Inupiat computer “world game,” earthlings are never alone. That is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company.” (Haraway, D. 2016)

This process of worlding-with non-humans is also enacted in nimiia cétiï (2018) by Finnish artist Jenna Sutela. Sutela has developed a rich body of work engaging with technology, speculative fiction based on historical events, and other-than-human worlds.

nimiia cétiï begins with a shot of Bacillus subtilis bacteria moving under a microscope. The bacteria transform into pixelated moving trails that slowly form semi-alphabetic patterns. These patterns gradually develop into the alphabet of an alien language, voiced throughout the video. The images of bacteria are intercut with shots of a camera hovering over the rust-coloured desert landscape of Mars.

Sutela has trained a neural network on her own voice, which responds frame by frame to the configuration of the bacteria’s movement by generating sound. Meanwhile, a secondary sonic layer extrapolates from earlier material, repeating and mutating what it has already absorbed, creating a feedback loop. This machinic speech evokes the figure of Hélène Smith, the nineteenth-century Swiss medium who claimed to channel Martian communications. Her invented language became a foundational example of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. Smith became a muse for surrealist automatism and psychography, and decades later the surrealists took up her concept of automatic writing to explore the potential of the unconscious.

Through collaboration with non-humans, technology, and bacteria, Sutela highlights the processes through which meaning comes into being and raises the question of whether genuine communication with the non-human is possible. Drawing on the early surrealists’ fascination with automatic writing and the functions of speech, she replaces the human medium with the machine as a channel for non-human communication.

nimiia cétiï emerges from experiments in interspecies and other-than-human communication, and tests the boundaries of expression beyond human cognition by taking language itself as material. The language remains opaque and impenetrable, and this alien opacity signals the impossibility of easily grasping the non-human world. Communication itself is a relational phenomenon that does not begin with human consciousness, but arises from complex systems of interaction.

Like Abyssal Plane, nimiia cétiï does not ask what the world means; rather, it reveals how it comes into being, moment by moment, through entanglements. Meaning appears as a byproduct of these entanglements, suggesting a post-surrealist approach in which the unconscious is no longer exclusively a human faculty, but is dispersed across biological and computational systems.

A similar approach unfolds in the works of Jani Ruscica, who has for a long time been investigating the processual construction of meaning and its embodied implications. Ruscica creates absurd and yet humorous worlds where meaning, language, bodies, and signs merge with one another in a surreal manner.

I came across the video work Human Flesh (2019) in the collection. In this 16-minute video, a set of fleshy, anthropomorphic, computer-generated typographic figures spell words in a studio-like, minimal, and sterile setting. Each letter of the title “Human Flesh” is restricted to compulsively spelling only words that begin with the letter it embodies, and the letters are given human voices (improvised by real actors).

The work activates a claustrophobic feeling, as if real human bodies were trapped within these typographic figures, their expressive abilities shrunken and exhausted. The deconstructed semiotic structure and patterns of the work bring to mind the Dadaist sound poetry of Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters.

Radically anti-representationalist and performative, Ruscica explores the transmission of meaning by distancing himself from conventional semantics and reveals how meaning is always mediated and contingent. Representationalism here is the belief that the knower and the known are two independent entities, and that knowledge or representation functions as a mediator between them.

This divide converts matters of representation into matters of fact, thereby concealing that knowledge and representation are always embodied, filtered, and mediated. Acknowledging this mediation paves the way for a performative reading that foregrounds how meaning and bodies are continuously enacted.

Barad offers insight into this notion of performativity:

“A performative understanding of discursive practices challenges the representationalist belief in the power of words to represent preexisting things. Performativity, properly construed, is not an invitation to turn everything (including material bodies) into words; on the contrary, performativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real.” (Barad, K. 2007)

In Human Flesh, Ruscica uses a humorous and absurdist strategy to turn material bodies into words. As these word-bodies stutter and falter, the work undermines the apparent transparency of language, allowing absurd and contingent logic to progressively supplant conventional, normative ways of sense-making. Human Flesh insists on the visibility of the linguistic and discursive practices that construct the body as a bio-discursive formation.

This body-centred approach to art is a recurring tendency throughout the Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection, and one that is difficult to overlook. In many of the paintings, photographs, videos, and sculptural works, bodies appear in all shapes, stages, and forms. Even when the body is not directly visible, traces of its presence remain as a point of reference.

A good example is Lynn Hershman Leeson’s video work from 1978, A Commercial for Myself, in which she uses the format of a television advertisement to promote herself as an artist, speaking about herself in the third person as if she were not present. To understand this video, it is helpful to consider her visionary practice from its earliest stages. A pioneer of cyberfeminism and post-humanist art, Hershman Leeson has for decades explored cyborg identities and data bodies, bringing to light the processes through which subjectivity and identity are formed in the digital age.

Part human, part technology, her personas blur the line between the fictional and the real. They emerge within networks of relations, both physical and digital, impure and without roots or origins. The myth of origin presupposes purity and an inevitable return to a lost wholeness, at both individual and societal levels. It relies on a form of deterministic essentialism that sustains an insider/outsider dichotomy, inevitably excluding and erasing the “Othered”.

Hershman Leeson embodies this otherness, staging and performing it as an ephemeral and partial subject that exists only in fragments of time, for as long as we watch, for as long as the network remains stable.

“Every story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation—that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the Other.” (Haraway. D, 1985)

A relational ontology is anti-essentialist, rejecting roots and the purity of origin in favour of fluid associations and kinships. Hershman’s avatars and personas emerge as processual constructions which, in her own words, “have the ability to empower viewers by causing them to defy conventional linear structures and create new possibilities for autonomous action and gendered agency.”

Hershman Leeson’s performative self-mediation demonstrates how identity emerges relationally through technological, social, and narrative infrastructures, rather than from any stable source or origin.

The digital and ephemeral bodies of Hershman relate to another outstanding video in the collection: Charlie Prodger’s Saf05 (2019), presented at the Scottish Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. In this 40-minute, intimate and diary-like video essay, multiple locations, temporalities, and narratives overlap and intertwine. Partly shot on the artist’s smartphone and partly composed of found CCTV footage, the video opens with images of a rare maned lioness, Saf05, documented by conservationists in the Okavango Delta in Botswana to study its behaviour.

The next shot shows Prodger’s point of view, filming downward: a rock and the artist’s feet while moving towards the edge and looking into the abyss. The sound of drones fills the filmic space, competing with Prodger’s soft and intimate voice reading diary entries. This diaristic mode of storytelling is at times interrupted and paralleled by a scientific account of the lioness’s behaviour and habitat. The image resists coherence with the voice. We move with the camera from the Scottish Highlands to the Great Basin Desert, the Okavango Delta, and the Greek Ionian Islands, while the soundscape shifts from the ominous sound of the drone to diegetic sounds of nature, bagpipe music, and the artist’s voice-over.

The title of the film, the opening scene of the maned lioness moving under the gaze of the camera, and Prodger’s personal, intimate, and at times sensual narratives create a sense of parallel and kinship between the artist and the lioness, a relation grounded not in essence but in performance. Technology and mediation remain constantly visible and audible, through camera shakes, the sound of the microphone touching a surface, the shadow of the drone in the image, and Prodger’s voice addressing the camera operator, elements that are usually left out. These extra-diegetic interferences foreground the presence of mediation and technology, making it an active agent in the work.

Prodger’s body is not visible, apart from bits and pieces occasionally appearing in the corners of the image. All that exists is a set of fragmented memories, anecdotes, correspondences, affects, relations, fluctuations, and motion. What we see is the landscape and the motion of Prodger’s body through it, while a sonic field of memories accompanies this sense of movement. The camera becomes an extension of the body and a witness to being in the world, inviting everything that the body experiences. The cinematic practice through which these landscapes are shown can be understood as a dynamic visualisation of attunement, as a proposal for worlding-with, for engaging with the world, as an embodied grasp of the landscape in relation to affect, identity, and selfhood.

The movement of bodies becomes the subject of the works of two other artists in the collection whose practices engage with human social life and biopolitics: The Sea of the Lost (2016) by Swiss-Caribbean-Finnish artist Sasha Huber and The Russian Empire Passport (2016) by Kurdish-Iranian-Finnish artist Dzamil Kamanger.

Huber’s practice, informed by colonial histories of the Middle Passage, blurs the line between art and activism, between archival research and acts of reparation. The work in the collection, The Sea of the Lost, is a wooden, boat-shaped sculpture with thousands of metal staples forming waves on its surface, in memory of the 2 millions abducted and enslaved Africans who did not survive the Middle Passage.

Huber developed her visual language of stapling in 2004 with the portrait series Shooting Back. For Huber, it was initially an act of fighting back against the violence of colonialism in Haiti through her art. Using a stapling gun and “shooting” at portraits of colonisers and dictators, she found a remedy in an artistic release in creating these works. Later, she chose not to continue creating portraits of colonisers and others who inflicted harm on colonised people. Her Shooting Back method subsequently transformed into a new form of resistance and a means of healing the colonial wound, as she mentioned in an interview in NO NIIN magazine in 2023.

Her method, beyond its formal novelty, is deeply embedded in the conceptual and historical context of her work. In Tailoring Freedom – Renty and Delia (2021), the colonial photograph of Renty, an enslaved Congolese man, is “dressed” with staples. Renty’s portrait was originally commissioned in 1850 by Agassiz, the Swiss-American racist biologist and geologist, as part of a colonial tradition of documenting enslaved people violently and often without clothing.

Here, the act of stapling becomes a way of stitching the colonial wound, as Huber herself describes it, as well as an act of repair and restitution of stolen human dignity. Through stapling, she dresses her subjects, armouring them against the colonial gaze and creating a metal layer that protects them from the violent histories that shaped their destinies.

Having roots in the Caribbean, Huber relates her own biographical and familial history to that of those whose histories have been ignored, forgotten, or overlooked. Collective healing of collective pain requires collective remembrance.

The sculpture becomes a site of memory and a monument to collective remembrance, standing for countless deceased bodies without directly depicting either the bodies or the violence inflicted upon them. The work functions as a time capsule, linking the present to the past and connecting a historical event to the time of the exhibition. A highly affectively charged object, it carries loss, mourning, and the hope of repair. Huber’s practice renders historical memory relational by transforming acts of violence, repair, and remembrance into material processes that connect past bodies to present responsibilities.

A similar artistic strategy for engaging with collective and historical pasts can be found in the work of Dzamil Kamanger. Kamanger has long woven his own biographical history into collective histories and geopolitical tensions through meticulous and densely charged beaded objects. An interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes video, sculpture, woven works, textiles, performance, and public art, he has explored notions of belonging, mobility, and loss throughout his career.

As a Kurdish artist, Kamanger experienced displacement, statelessness, and imprisonment during the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s. This experience has deeply shaped his practice as a self-taught artist. His work is strongly autobiographical and embodied, and the dense history of the region he has lived in and fled from often forms its subject.

In his labour-intensive beaded passports, visas, and residency permits, produced between 2012 and 2017, Kamanger creates a series of works composed of carefully and delicately beaded documents. Many of these passports correspond to real and existing nations, while others depict nations that have ceased to exist, such as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, and some belong to nations that have never existed, pointing to people’s long struggle for self-determination.

There are also passports of the World or Utopia, which in their simplicity open up an imaginative space for a different world order beyond the border regimes and biopolitics of inclusion and exclusion. Another series includes passports to heaven and hell for different religions, humorously calling into question the modern bureaucratic nature of religion as a marker of belonging or othering.

The work in the Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection, The Russian Empire Passport (2016), questions the legitimacy of the empire and its political borders, as well as their consequences and implications. The work carries particular resonance in the context of Finland, which was ruled by the Russian Empire from 1809 to 1917, a period of 108 years during which a sense of national identity was shaped both during and after the process of independence.

Kamanger’s beaded passports reveal belonging and identity as relational constructions shaped by mobility, memory, and political imagination, rather than by the authority of political borders. How do we create a sense of belonging? What makes us feel part of a community? These are open-ended questions that Kamanger poses, leaving them for the audience to consider in their own ways.

Although both works reveal experiences of historical trauma, they also suggest new modes of belonging and new ways of opening to the world. The experiences of statelessness or the Middle Passage both give rise to a new kind of identity: a relational one.

Drawing on the Caribbean experience of slavery, rupture, displacement, and forced migration, Édouard Glissant elaborates a deeply political and social theory of relationality in his book Poetics of Relation (1997). In his native Caribbean, post-slavery culture has developed from multiple histories of displacement, trauma, and resistance, rather than from a single root sunk deep into ancestral soil.

From the traumatic event of slavery emerges what Glissant calls creolisation: the production of something new through contact and relation, in ways that resist prediction and control. When history is violently interrupted, root-based thinking produces only a permanent sense of lack in relation to an impossible original unity.

What Glissant proposes instead is an identity that is multiple, dynamic, and errant, not reducible to any myth of origin. He describes the root as intolerant and totalitarian, whereas rooted errantry, grounded in immediate and temporary connections, is less bound to strict lineage and therefore more liberating.

Both Kamanger and Huber centre this errant body in their work by staging its absence: bodies that are present only through the networks of relations, encounters, and histories that shape them. Huber’s stapled boat and Kamanger’s passports are witnesses to such bodies and to these tales of errantry.

In Huber’s boat, the staple — an instrument of binding and fixing — becomes a tool of memory, a way of holding together what history has tried to disperse. Each staple is at once a wound and a suture, a mark of violence and an act of care. The boat that sits in the gallery is a vessel that will never complete its passage, and yet it carries not bodies but their memory, not lives but their loss. This is the work of errantry: to build a vessel that can hold what was lost, even if it never reaches a shore.

In Kamanger’s passports, to bead the document designed to control movement is to transform it into an object of meditation on belonging. The beaded passports cannot be stamped or inspected, nor do they grant or deny entry. They are useless for their original purpose, and in this uselessness they open a space for belonging otherwise: not to a nation, not to an empire, not even to a utopia, but to something more fragile, provisional, and dependent on the relations we inhabit. The passports render the border itself strange, exposing its contingency without suggesting that this makes it any less real in its effects.

To encounter these works is to encounter an ethics of relation that does not promise reconciliation or hope. The wound does not close. The passport does not grant passage. The boat does not arrive. And yet something more durable is offered: a way of staying with the trouble, of building from the break, of making kinship across the very ruptures that were meant to isolate.

This essay emerges from my encounter with the Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection within the framework of a six-month curatorial fellowship at EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art. The Collection consists of more than 3,000 artworks, forming a body of work that does not merely reflect the plurality of artistic practices it contains, but actively nurtures and stages them.

The outcome of my research in the Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection is not an interpretation of the collection, nor was my intention to shed light on less familiar or less visible artworks. Rather, my aim has been to test a methodology and a way of understanding and contextualising art on the fertile ground of the collection. A way of understanding that remains responsive to the living and dynamic character of artistic practices and of the collection itself, but also to the world.

One that enables us to see how deeply entangled our lives are with the other beings of this planet, and makes us aware of the responsibilities that emerge from these entanglements. It also shows that art, like any other language of knowledge, is situated and cannot claim universality, but instead acts as a carrier bag of the many stories we tell about ourselves, our worlds, and the ways we inhabit them.

To move through the Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection with these works in mind is to experience a shift in orientation. One begins to look at artworks not in terms of medium, style, art-historical lineage, or surface aesthetic values, but in terms of how they relate: to their own materials, to the bodies that encounter them, to the histories they carry, and to the futures they imagine.

Within this framework, meaning is never simply found, but continuously enacted: through the multiplication of viewpoints in Ahtila’s installations, the sympoietic ecologies of Huyghe’s aquarium, the bacterial collaborations of Sutela’s glossolalia, the embodied semiotics of Ruscica, the hybrid bodies of Hershman and Prodger, and the errant bodies that haunt Huber’s stapled waves and Kamanger’s beaded passports.

The artists gathered here, in their multiplicity, offer models of being-with that refuse the comfort of the fiction of autonomy, hold open the opacity of the other, and make visible the entanglements from which no being emerges alone. To read the collection relationally is therefore not simply an academic exercise, but an ethical orientation, a way of remaining accountable to the knots of history, matter, and meaning in which we are all embedded.

What I have traced here is one among many threads that run through the collection. The works, in their affinities and divergences, and in the ways they speak to one another across generations and geographies, offer something worth attending to: an opening towards an understanding in which we are always already touching, and being touched by, worlds near and far.

This research would not have been possible without the support and generosity of the Saastamoinen Foundation and EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, who made this fellowship and research possible, shared their expertise, provided access to the collection, and enabled direct dialogue with many artists in Helsinki and beyond.

 I would also like to extend my gratitude to the artists Sasha Huber, Jani Ruscica, Dzamil Kamanger, Kalle Hamm, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Jenna Sutela, and many others who spent time with me and generously shared insights into their practices, as well as to the wider Helsinki art community, which revealed to me the vibrancy of the city’s art scene and made me feel welcome and at home.

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