Summer at Grazer Kunstverein

Alma Heikkilä
5 June – 7 August 2020


Image courtesy of Petri Virtanen / Kansallisgalleria.

Heikkilä works in an age of environmental crises, climate change and mass extinction. Pressured by the immensity of these emergencies, she seeks to find new and alternative ways to work, think and act as an artist. She recognises and acknowledges the impacts of her work and her own role in a multispecies world. Her artistic practice, finding form in living sculpture and large-scale painting, evokes a deep sensorial knowledge of ecosystems, microbia, and the interdependencies of myriad organisms in mutual co-existance. At essence, her work explores objects tha are beyond ordinary human perception, such as microscopic bacteria, fungi and other minuscule species. Heikkilä will undertake a new commission for the galleries of Grazer Kunstverein, that will become a focal point for further discussion around the instituiton’s process of reflection, awareness, and consciousness in terms of energy production and consumption.

Alma Heikkilä (born 1984) lives and works in Helsinki. She is a founding member of Mustarinda, a multidisciplinary collective located in the old-growth forests of northern Finland, that hosts residencies at the intersection between art and ecology. Heikkilä graduated from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2009. She has shown her work in solo exhibitions at Kiasma, Helsinki (2019), Casco Art Institute, Rotterdam (2018), Gallery Ama, Helsinki (2017, 2013), and elsewhere. She has participated in biennials in Fiskars, Finland; Timisoara, Romania; Gwanju, South Korea. She was awarded the Ducat Prize of the Finnish Art Society in 2014. Her work is included in the collections of Kiasma and the Finnish National Gallery.