The Slow Biennial: Helsinki’s Gentle Vision for Environmental Art

We often think of the Nordic countries as exemplars of sustainability in both lifestyle and cultural practices. Finland, in this sense, doesn’t disappoint. It instills this ecological consciousness long before the visitor even sets foot on Vallisaari Island, one of the three locations of the third edition of the Helsinki Biennial, which is currently unfolding.

The art encounter in Helsinki begins in the most unexpected of places: the airport restrooms. There, artificial birdsong—subtle and, of course, synthetic—trickles through the speakers, momentarily suspending the sterile context and suggesting a slice of forest instead. Then there’s the escalator that connects the airport to the train station. What could be another non-place is softened by moving projections of dancers from the Finnish National Ballet against a monumental, museum-like wall of concrete. Art and environment begin to merge subtly and pervasively even before you’ve entered the city proper.

Because that’s the thing; in Helsinki, it becomes impossible to distinguish where art ends and ecology begins. This blurring is not just a feature of the Biennial but is evident throughout the city center, almost entirely built in Jugendstil architecture, where nature’s curves are translated into doorways and windows carved into pervasive granite. In the Temppeliaukio Church, Brutalist cement walls are anchored into rock, and dry-stone walls and a halo of minimalist glass hold up a great copper dome.

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It goes without saying that the Helsinki Biennial blurs boundaries between nature and nurture, inside and outside, installation and environment. Titled “Shelter: Below and Beyond, Becoming and Belonging,” the third edition positions itself as a quiet manifesto for ecological exhibition-making. At the same time, it remains acutely aware of themes that now feel unavoidable in any major art showcase: spirit of place meeting postcolonial discourses from elsewhere, trans-feminism (without spelling it out; almost all the artists are women) and environmentalism.

“As curators, we sought to step away from human-centred thinking, instead engaging with more-than-human memories, intelligences and sensibilities,” Kati Kivinen, who co-curated the Biennial alongside Blanca de la Torre, told Observer. Moving away from anthropocentrism is another prevailing theme of today’s biennials, as seen in Nicolas Bourriaud’s Gwangju Biennial, “Pansori,” which bypassed the human, letting A.I. and nature communicate directly.

“The point is that sustainability is not a subject. It is an attitude, a way to live in the world,” continued Kivinen. “It is not only about carbon footprints and energy consumption. It’s a way of rethinking all aspects of the exhibition—from how we ship and produce the works to the materials we use and how we involve local communities and avoid extractivist practices. Sustainability must be part of the curatorial DNA, not an afterthought.”

Just as vital was ecological production itself. From calculating carbon footprints to favoring local nontoxic materials to promoting traditional crafts, every curatorial decision considered environmental consequences. The team even created a sustainability decalogue with principles of climate optimism, because “pessimistic visions and apocalyptic landscapes only lead to paralysis and inaction.”

According to Arja Miller, director of Helsinki Art Museum and the Biennial, three things make the event unique: “The first is the very close and multifaceted, committed collaboration with the city of Helsinki. The second is the dimension of public art. We strive to enhance even further the connection with public art in the future. And third is the sea and the beautiful islands of Helsinki, an inseparable part of this city and its history.”

That dual refrain—more-than-human listening and sustainability as ethos—grounds the Biennial’s unfolding across three distinct sites: the reclaimed wilderness of Vallisaari, the structured urbanity of Esplanade Park and the museum.

HAM: The white cube

Visitors are welcomed by a sculpted seagull head that playfully and surreally towers at the entrance of the Helsinki Art Museum. Inside, the surrealism continues with a giant transgenic-looking flower by Yayoi Kusama, part of her Flowers that Bloom Tomorrow series.

Nature on a grand scale continues with Ingela Ihrman’s Giant Hogweed, an enlarged representation of the perennial herb Heracleum mantegazzianum, a plant introduced as ornamental and now an invasive species. To the non-botanist, the first impression is that of a blown dandelion expressing a wish—perhaps a representation of human willpower pushing against nature.

The curatorial selection process, according to de la Torre, was deliberate and collaborative: “We compiled names of artists that we found compelling. I was the one suggesting more names from the global south, while Kati provided invaluable insights from the Nordic art scene.” They sought artists working with repair and storytelling—those who could weave scientific knowledge with Indigenous cosmologies and folklore.

One example is Aluaiy Kaumakan, an artist from the Pangcah (Amis) Indigenous community in Taiwan, who presents a textile work hanging from the ceiling, using a traditional weaving practice that merges ancestral resilience with contemporary trauma recovery and refers in particular to Typhoon Morakot in 2009, which displaced the people from her village.

Vallisaari Island: The wilds

In true biennial fashion, a ferry is involved. Be it Venice or Istanbul, water is often the threshold. On a rainy Helsinki day, we head to Vallisaari Island, once a military zone and now home to bats, moss and ghost stories. Artworks here try—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—to embed themselves into the ecology.

“The exhibition in Vallisaari provided a way to activate this idea of shelter—not only for humans but through the eyes of other species,” says Kivinen. “The artworks interact with the existing environment, which is very rich and lively. In a way, the island is a host—not just for us humans but for all the species that live here.”

Geraldine Javier’s Witness, hosted within an abandoned building, is among the most evocative: columns of eco-printed fabric evoke tree rings, telling layered stories of time and trauma. “It’s about evoking the tree rings, and how tree rings are affected by the changes in the environment,” Javier tells Observer. “Each of the columns represents a different narrative. For example, one is about the history of Vallisaari. The inside is about the war and explosions, and then it became bereft of people, and when this was abandoned, nature was able to proliferate.”

Ana Teresa Barboza’s Salt Bark spans continents, using both birch bark from Finland and Yanchama bark from the Peruvian Amazon to create a tentacular installation that threads through the damp rooms of another abandoned outpost. “The first part you see when you enter is bark from Finland. The other part is made with Yanchama bark from the Peruvian Amazon,” she says. “We traveled to Puerto Maldonado, a place in the Amazon, and we saw with the artisan how they extract the Yanchama bark, and the drawings you can see on the bark represent this process.” Her concept was to create parallel histories connecting the North and the South.

Katie Holten’s Learning to Be Better Lovers (Forest School) offers a playful revolution in language, evoking schoolrooms, summer programs and scout camps. She invented a tree alphabet, inviting visitors to spell words by substituting each letter with the silhouette of a plant. “What if we wrote using trees? What would we say, and who could read it?” she asks. “Learning to Be Better Lovers is something that I’ve been doing for the last few years about the fact that our species needs to learn how to care for each other, but also for this planet. We’ve forgotten how to love in ways that include other species.”

However, the path across the island that should lead visitors to each work like a via crucis reveals that not all the pieces feel in dialogue with their setting. Some, conceived outside the logic of land art, appear parachuted in. Others, more ineffable, like artificial smells, go almost unnoticed. The five-kilometer walk—however poetic—doesn’t always foster a mindset conducive to art contemplation. If humans use wilderness to escape culture, why add artworks to nature—particularly in a forest, already so full of competing elements, than in a desert or meadow?

Esplanade Park: The sweet spot

Historically, compromise between nature and culture is found in gardens, and a garden-like dimension appears in this Biennial at Esplanade Park, its new site. Here, the curated meets the civic.

Amid linden trees and weekend picnickers, the artworks intervene softly, like Hamm and Dzamil Kamanger’s Bug Rugs, four insect-hotel sculptures whose decorative patterns draw on a Finnish rya wool tapestry and a Kurdish kilim rug. Nearby, Gediminas Urbonas’s Unmelting Black (Snowman 1:1)—a sculpture in Karelian black granite—echoes Japanese stone art.

“Esplanade’s challenge was to use the constructed beauty of the surroundings to think about what artworks might fit there,” Kivinen explains. The park’s “nature as a source of inspiration” led to works like Park Hotels for pollinators—tiny architectural shelters installed in flower beds, reminding visitors that urban biodiversity is fragile, purposeful and in need of care.

In a recent interview with Frieze, de la Torre spoke of the importance of developing sustainable methodologies in order to ensure the fruition of a slow biennial: “Beyond managing the biennial’s carbon footprint, we are considering other footprints, like emotional footprints, and thinking about sustainability in a holistic way.”

The Biennial delivers on this front in the sense that it unfolds in the moment, strives for harmony and doesn’t elicit particularly strong emotions. Which raises yet another question: Do we want art to affect us so imperceptibly that it’s like nothing ever happened? Should we be reducing our emotional footprint alongside the environmental? Wouldn’t we rather be consumed, transformed, destroyed and rebuilt by art, as by a great love?

The third edition of the Helsinki Biennial is open through September 21, 2025, on Vallisaari Island, in Esplanade Park and at Helsinki Art Museum.