PORI ART MUSEUM: EXHIBITION PROGRAMME 2025
The Pori Art Museum’s exhibition programme for 2025 weaves together the present moment of art and different histories, agencies and rituals.
Pori Art Museum will reopen to the public on 31 January 2025 upon completion of the building’s renovation. The focus of the opening year’s exhibition programme is on the uniqueness of artworks and encounters with art that arise from visitors’ own desire and interest in seeking out art. The museum’s exhibition spaces – the large Hall gallery, the Wing annex divided into three separate areas, and the Poriginal gallery now relocated to the museum building – provide unique contexts for interpretations and discussions on the meaning and significance of art.
SPRING – SUMMER 2025
Monumental music
The 2025 exhibition program will open with the genre-bending and boundary-braking experimental rock band Circle and their sculptural and sound-based installation Point (Piste). Working in the space between avant-garde sound art and rock music genres, Circle is known for its repetitively monumental and sculptural music, as well as trance-like performative live shows. Commissioned by the Pori Art Museum for its main gallery, the piece reinterprets Circle’s artistic ethos for a spatial exhibition environment. The soundscape composed for the work, the geometric shapes of the sculptures, and the participatory activities establish a space for interaction that blurs the boundaries between art, life, creativity and spectatorship.
Circle, a Pori-based phenomena, will play in the Pori Art Museum during the “housewarming” event on November 16th 2024 offering a taste of the exhibition to come and celebrating the newly renovated museum building. More information and tickets available at the museum’s webpage.
Enhanced visibility for collections, topical contemporary art discourses and archaeology of art-historical knowledge
The Pori Art Museum is founded on the life’s work of Professor Maire Gullichsen (1907–1990) and the art collection of a foundation bearing her name. Consisting mainly of modern Finnish art, the collection now has a dedicated exhibition space in the Wing annex. The exhibition Maire Gullichsen and the Turning Points of Modernism will recontextualise iconic works from the collection by juxtaposing them with less frequently exhibited pieces. The reductive style of Helene Schjerfbeck, the colourful paintings of Magnus Enckell and Ellen Thesleff, the abstract still lifes of Sam Vanni, and the constructivist works of Lars-Gunnar Nordström are all milestones of Finnish art from the transformative periods of the 20th century.
The second half of the Wing annex will feature a selection of works from the AD HOC Collection donated to the museum by Kristian and Kirsi Gullichsen. The show will also highlight the prominence in the museum’s history of the work of architect Kristian Gullichsen, who designed the original conversion of the building in which the museum was first opened in 1981. The works selected for the exhibition showcase the role of abstract thinking that lies at the heart of modern art and architecture.
In the summer, a show by Pori-based artist Laura Lilja will open in the temporary exhibitions space in the Wing annex. In her works, Lilja merges the practices of conceptual art with the deconstruction of political symbols. The show will feature her most recent works, installations made from used cargo straps that recall the traditions of classical landscape and colour field painting.
The small exhibition room in the Wing annex, adjacent to the archaeological remains of a 17th-century stone cellar discovered during the museum’s expansion in the early 2000s, focuses on exhibitions that highlight specific thematic contexts or theories of art. The shows consist of overviews of the recent history of contemporary art, reinterpretations and highlights from the museum’s own exhibition history, as well as topical subjects of contemporary art. The first show of the year will be Adrian Piper’s classic work Funk Lessons (1983), a video piece in the form of a performance documentation. The summer exhibition will present photographic series by Cuban artist Marta María Peréz Bravo from the 1980s to the mid-1990s. The photographs, touching on themes of motherhood, are from the museum’s own collections.
AUTUMN SEASON 2025
The autumn season will kick off in the Hall gallery with a show called Sugar Doors, a joint presentation by four Finnish contemporary artists: Essi Kausalainen, Olli Keränen, Mikko Kuorinki and Maija Luutonen. The exhibition represents a continuation of the shared history of discussions and collective studio work among the artists. In the exhibition, paintings, sculptures, installations, and performances are all in spatial interaction with each other. The materials as well as forms of the works often point past the art object to elements familiar from the home or the urban environment. The group’s practice echoes the strong tradition of conceptual thinking in contemporary art, drawing attention to the constructed nature of art and the complexity of processes relating to meaning.
The temporary exhibitions space in Wing will feature a show by the Berlin-based contemporary artist melanie bonajo. Pori Art Museum has in its collection a video work by bonajo entitled Nocturnal Gardening (2016), which belongs to bonajo’s Night Soil trilogy (2014–2016). The exhibition brings together all three works of the trilogy in an expanded installation form. The common theme in the works is human agency that operates beyond social norms. At their core, the works are about the establishment of alternative ways of being and rituals in the vacuum of meaning in contemporary society.
The small exhibition room in the Wing will feature a show by Shia Conlon and Iona Roisin. It will consist of works by the two artists and a selection of literature from Trans Library Helsinki, a repository of literature by queer and trans writers run by the two artists.
Pori Art Museum’s full exhibition programme in 2025
The 2025 exhibition programme at Pori Art Museum is compiled by the museum’s director and chief curator of exhibitions in collaboration with the curators responsible for collections and outreach work, and other museum staff. This year, curator Max Hannus was invited as an external member of the Poriginal Open Call jury. Pori Art School’s traditional children’s spring exhibition will be displayed in the Art Museum’s lecture hall.
1.2. – 31.8.2025 Circle
1.2. – Maire Gullichsen and the Turning Points of Modernism
1.2. – 1.6.2025 Collection exhibition, Architect’s Room: Abstraction and Utopia
1.2. – 1.6.2025 Adrian Piper: Funk Lessons
11.4. – 26.5.2025 Pori Art School exhibition
14.6. – 31.8.2025 Laura Lilja
14.6. – 31.8.2025 Marta María Peréz Bravo
27.9.2025 – 1.3.2026 Sugar Doors: Essi Kausalainen, Olli Keränen, Mikko Kuorinki, Maija Luutonen
27.9.2025 – 1.3.2026 melanie bonajo
27.9.2025 – 1.3.2026 Shia Conlon and Iona Roisin, Trans Library Helsinki
Poriginal
The Poriginal Gallery, which was previously housed in a separate building, will in the future be located in the main museum building. In 2025, the Poriginal gallery will feature six exhibitions of contemporary art selected through an open call, all of which will present different perspectives on the practice, aesthetics and social relevance of contemporary art.
Poriginal:
1.2. – 23.3. Elis Hannikainen and Vappu Jalonen
29.3. – 11.5. Taru Happonen
17.5. – 6.7. Karim Boumjimar
12.7. – 7.9. Hillevi Vähälä-Aranko
13.9. – 2.11. Kastehelmi Korpijaakko
8.11. – 4.1. 2026 Minjee Hwang Kim and Risako Yamanoi
Further inquiries:
Arttu Merimaa /
Chief Curator of Exhibitions
arttu.merimaa@pori.fi
tel. +358 44 701 3965