We are proud to support the solo exhibition INDIVIDUALITY, IDENTITY, AND RELATED METAPHYSICAL IDEAS by Helsinki-based artist Alma Heikkilä at RADIUS, a center for contemporary art and ecology in Delft, The Netherlands, 31.5. – 24.8.2025.
INDIVIDUALITY, IDENTITY, AND RELATED METAPHYSICAL IDEAS by artist Alma Heikkilä.
Curated by Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk.
Dates: 31.5. – 24.8.2025.
Exhibition opening: 31.5.2025, 16:00–19:00
Location: RADIUS, center for contemporary art and ecology, Kalverbos 20, 2611 XW Delft, The Netherlands.
Accessibility: more info coming soon.
Heikkilä’s works are often attempts to represent things that cannot be experienced by the human body and its senses. These include microbial life forms too small to be consciously encountered in everyday life; forest ecosystems where important processes occur underground and within plants; and many large-scale phenomena that occur at speeds and dimensions beyond our comprehension. She is a founding member of Mustarinda, a multidisciplinary collective based in the ancient forests of Northern Finland that organises residencies at the intersection of art and ecology.
For her solo exhibition at RADIUS, Heikkilä will present new work that explores the entanglement of the human body with the environment. The emphasis will be of humans and the often unnoticed importance of microbial life forms that make human life possible—think, for example, of bacteria in the intestinal flora, or phytoplankton in the production of oxygen. Mixing ideas around philosophy of biology, biological individuality, metaphysics, and personal identity, the works in the exhibition confuse and challenge the understanding in both the oneness and sameness of who we are.
For Heikkilä, art is a domain for multispecies collaboration and communality. By connecting with an array of different modes of being, ranging from bacteria, fungal spores, and other agencies that conjointly are and shape the fundamental building blocks of life on Earth, her role as an artist seems modest: extending an invitation to gather and connect. However, this invitation is not necessarily meant as to solely have an experience of something or to make an appointment with thought—as an individuated and intellectual exercise, joining with our preconceived knowledges and epistemological maps in hand—but an invitation that equally serves to make our feedback loops come full circle: the embrainment of the body and the embodiment of the brain, whilst embedded in the shared living environment, here solidified in the shape of an exhibition. This invitation is thus formulated and extended in diametrical opposition to the conventional anthropocentric, western, and modernist notion of art as a cultural field of inter-human energy-exchange, where intentionalities are unveiled in the shape of objects, and receptions and understandings govern through apprehending and grappling human subjects.
In line with the previous, art and life coincide in Heikkilä’s artistic practice, quite literally, as her work is both indebted to and engrained with the different other-than-human-agencies that co-author the work—including microorganisms she carries within her own body, among bacteria indispensable to human health and wellbeing. Heikkilä literally works with the materials; they are not merely resources, but co-agencies. From this symbiotic and reciprocal understanding, the large-scale painting works presented at RADIUS thus bypass a mere representational field and painterly pictorial regime, to their recovery in the key of being and becoming sites of multifarious ontological grounding, in the plural. In other words still, painting is not a metaphor, image or mirror, but a multispecies site of becoming-with, of worlding-possibility.
On the occasion of this exhibition, RADIUS have invited Daisy Lafarge to contribute a text to coincide with this exhibition. Daisy Lafarge is a writer and artist based in Glasgow, UK. Born in Hastings, she has lived in Scotland since 2011. Her writing on ecology, art and literature has been widely published, among Lovebug (2023), a book on the poetics of infection, which we considered resonant in relation to the work of Alma Heikkilä.
The RADIUS 2025 year-programme BEYOND POLITICAL LIMITS, of which this exhibition is a part, has been made possible with support from the Mondriaan Fund and the Municipality of Delft. This exhibition is made possible with additional support from the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux.
About the artist
Alma Heikkilä 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, Utrecht (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 by the Finnish Art Society in 2014.
Visit Alma Heikkilä’s website.
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About RADIUS
RADIUS is a center for contemporary art and ecology. RADIUS is located in the city of Delft and stationed in the pump house and water basin belonging to the Delft water tower, a historical national monument and architectural landmark. With five hundred square meters of subterranean exhibition space, their program is dedicated to the intersection of art, science and ecology.