TaHiTi (Journal of Art History), Vol. 16, No. 1 (2026), 65 pages

Special Issue Published: Art, Activism, and Gendered Violence

This special issue of TaHiTi draws on a theoretical tradition that emphasizes the political nature of feminist activism and gendered violence. The contributors examine the many intersections of art and violence through a wide range of art, including artists’ books, painting, literature, short films, tapestries, photography, performance art, and video art.

The articles explore diverse geographical and cultural contexts, ranging from Spanish activist art of recent decades to both contemporary and historical artistic practices in Finnish, Swedish, Sámi, and French-American settings. The issue addresses community-based contemporary art, published autobiographical experiences, portraiture that has circulated in multiple versions over centuries, and a Renaissance tapestry.

The issue includes two peer-reviewed research articles, two review essays—including an exhibition review—and one commentary. Together, these case studies highlight the diverse forms and transformative potential of activist and politically engaged art.

This special issue is the result of a collaboration between the project Artivism on Edges – Art, Activism and Gendered Violence (2022–2026), funded by the Kone Foundation, and the Society for Art History in Finland. From the research project, the issue was edited by Mari Mäkiranta and Jonna Tolonen (University of Lapland). On behalf of the Society for Art History in Finland, the special issue was edited by Editor-in-Chief Katve-Kaisa Kontturi (University of Turku).

Violence against women and those who identify as women must be addressed through multiple approaches—including scholar-activism. We hope this issue offers both engaging and thought-provoking reading.

The issue is available online at:

TaHiTi Journal – Vol. 16, No. 1 (2026)

Photograph by: Hugo Gutierrez

16.10.—7.12.2025

Hearing the Silence gathers six visual artists in Rovaniemi, weaving a collective tapestry of resistance, vulnerability, and voice. These works speak to the shadowed realities of violence—against women, transgender people, and those who live and identify as women. Gender-based violence is not confined by borders; it is a global crisis, a profound wound in the body of human rights. One in three women around the world have faced physical harm, threats, or sexual violence in their lifetime.

The exhibition’s title, Hearing the Silence, speaks not to the absence of sound, but to a presence long ignored—the muteness imposed by shame, fear, and indifference. Silence is the language violence often chooses. These artists, however, choose otherwise. They offer voice—sometimes delicate, sometimes fierce—to the unseen, the unheard, the unspoken. The works do not underline; they resonate. They do not depict violence, but echo its impact, and illuminate paths of resistance.

In Simi Ruotsalainen’s video work, we witness the realities of trans people. Jonna Tolonen’s posters trace stories suspended in the air—unfinished, unresolved. Rosamaría Bolom captures resistance blooming in the streets and the artwork itself becomes a form of protest. Mari Mäkiranta’s lens reveals the inner landscape of violence—intimate, aching, human.

Patricia Rodas balances on the fragile line between trauma and transformation, asking: how do we heal? Marte Lill Somby brings the experience of Sámi women into focus, where colonialism and domestic violence intertwine.

The exhibition includes a sound installation by Jonna Tolonen, and music by Shizukana, a sonic act of resilience. Proceeds from Shizukana’s album support the Federation of Mother and Child Homes and Shelters in Finland—a gesture of solidarity made tangible.

Hearing the Silence imagines alternatives to the violent imagery and discourses. It crafts space for shared strength, collective work, and societal change. The exhibition does not re-enact harm; it listens deeply to it. No violent images are shown. Instead, you will find a chorus of resistance, affects and interpretations.

To deepen the dialogue, a public seminar will be held on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, on 25 November 2025, from 10:00 to 15:30, in the Polarium Hall at Arktikum. Researchers and artists will gather to reflect and speak together. Visitors are invited not only to hear, but to discuss.

This exhibition and seminar are part of the project Artivism on Edges – Art, Activism, and Gendered Violence (2021–2026), supported by the Kone Foundation and the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Lapland.

5–28 September 2025
Hippolyte Studio

Mari Mäkiranta & Flowing Waters collective
Of Soil and Water

”I feel the cool water and the river’s current through my rubber boots. I bend down, immerse my hand in the water, lift up a sample bottle. Against the light the water looks yellowish. Nothing organic seems to move in it. Can water die? In what ways can we relate to dead water, when the activity of bacteria and microbes is an essential part of the forces that sustain life and keep us alive? What would happen if we understood the soil and water as our companions? Would the ethical, economic, and political privileges and primacy of human actors then be called into question?“
(Kittilä, 13 July 2021, excerpt from Mäkiranta’s research diary)

Mari Mäkiranta and the Flowing Waters collective’s exhibition explores the impact of mining on the riverine environments of the North. At its centre are performative photographic and video works, as well as soil and water samples collected from the areas of the Kittilä gold mine and the Kevitsa metal mine, to which the exhibition title also refers. The mines discharge their wastewater through pipelines into several rivers; the works in Of Soil and Water draw attention to the concern that even small concentrations of chemicals can be toxic to aquatic ecosystems. Finnish mining legislation does not define precise threshold values for the concentrations of wastewater released by mines, which enables their discharge almost without restriction into rivers inhabited by mussels, fish, and other living beings.

The video works on display combine the collective’s sampling rituals and walking performances, in which the effects of mining on nature become tangibly visible. The Kevitsa nickel-copper mine is located just over 30 kilometres north of Sodankylä, right on the boundary of a Natura 2000 area. The video work Orange Dust illustrates how pollutants from the mine spread beyond its fences into this protected area. In turn, the Kittilä gold mine channels its wastewater via a discharge pipeline into Loukinen, a tributary of the protected Ounasjoki River. The performance seen in A Twenty-Five Kilometre Walk took place on top of the discharge pipeline road, which had been constructed in nature without official permission. Through the performance, members of the collective opposed environmental destruction and expressed compassion towards nature.

Flowing Waters collective’s practice is situated within the tradition of activist art, which, in their case, means quietly attuning to nature. The exhibition makes visible the invisible yet ever-present threats, such as toxic concentrations in water and waste dust drifting in the air. Alongside the artworks, the exhibition also includes the research publication Orange Dust (2025), addressing art activism and northern nature, and written in collaboration with sociologist Vesa Puuronen

Of Soil and Water invites reflection on what might happen if we abandoned the appropriation and exploitation of nature. Could our technological–economic relationship to nature be transformed into one of encounter and responsibility? Would we allow nature to care for us—and would we know how to care for it?

The artist’s work has been supported by the Kone Foundation and the REBOUND project, University Lapland.

Photographs by: Milla Tallassalo

Mari Mäkiranta, Adaptation II, 2024.

Text by the exhibition curator Elisa Alaluusua:

Coleman Projects is delighted to present On the Edge, a group exhibition of eight artists from Finnish Lapland curated by Elisa Alaluusua.
 
This group of artists live and work in Finnish Lapland where nature can be harsh and distances challenging. The climate crisis is upon them. They are situated on the edge of the world, on the edge of Europe with a long border between Finland and Russia. They are literally, metaphorically and existentially on the edge.
 
As an alternative for peripheral silence and remote discourses, the group highlights the capacity to cross boundaries and work on the edges, be that in the geographical North or in their art practice. They find potential and tangible as well as spiritual content in northern circumferences.
 
The artists in the exhibition practice on the edges of more than one technique or media. They combine painting and drawing or printmaking and 3D work, or other materials and approaches. Art activism meets photography, boundaries – or edges – are broken and redefined in these works. Art is an intervention in the public space, a play with the lived details of the environment. Meaning is found in everyday experiences and objects; the body is lost in the landscape and new understanding gained through physical contact and settling into spaces.
 
Being situated on the edge shifts our focus and draws attention to boundaries that we cross constantly. Through our edge-defining practices we acknowledge human action as part of nature and trace the undefinable threshold between wilderness and the built environment. We map out places and transcribe time as we move forward.
 
The exhibition explores what it feels like to live on the edge in today’s world when unthinkable things can happen – yet you keep going and exploring though art.
 
Dr. Elisa Alaluusua
 
This group of artists are members of the professional body, Artists’ Association of Lapland*, and come from different disciplines.

This edited volume breaks new ground for understanding peripheries and peripherality by providing a multidisciplinary cross-exposure through a collection of chapters and visual essays by researchers and artists.

The book is a collection of approaches from several disciplines where the spatial, conceptual, and theoretical hierarchies and biased assumptions of ‘peripheries’ are challenged. Chapters provide a diverse collection of viewpoints, analyses, and provocations on ‘peripherality’ through bringing together international specialists to discuss the socio-political, aesthetic, artistic, ethical, and legal implications of ‘peripheral approach.’ The aim is to illuminate the existing, hidden, often incommensurable, and controversial margins in the society at large from equal, ethical, and empathic perspectives. 

Our Artivism issue is inspired by dismantling the contemporary conception of art and by a space where working methods, contents, and ideals produced by art have changed. This also enables negotiations and struggles between various conceptions of art. The art-historical contexts of activist art are rooted in 20th century avant-garde, German expressionism, and feminist art and in the anti-war and anti-racist civil rights movements of the 1960s. In the history of science, activism has been an essential part of European intellectuals’ self-understanding and operating culture. Today, as conceptions of art have changed, conceptions of science are also in flux. Small movements towards science activism, a new kind of integration of theory and practice, are emerging in Finland. Scientific and artistic practices have come closer to each other, recently influenced by material threats to humanity’s future: biodiversity loss and climate change. These threats are forcing us to give up on the 18th-century belief in progress and the anthropocentric worldview based on controlling nature. 

Politically transformative and critical art plays a central role in fights for environmental protection, gender diversity, and antiracism. Activist art, being often radical, searching for something new, and integrating people and environments, is tied to power–knowledge relations. In this issue, we approach artivism as performative art related to questions of power, matter, and representation as well as their relations. We focus on the fact that art, in its various creative forms, includes political objectives. At the same time, we explore the ways political action can be creative. Artivism, based on the interests of a researcher, artist, activist, and various communities, may be connected with personal and political objectives related to subjugation, resistance, and empowerment. Activism as a form of artistic practice may also be quiet, tentative, experimental, and searching. Sometimes, it leads to social changes. At other times, it appears as slow, nearly invisible movements and powers.

Artivism overlaps with the world’s material dimensions and materialistic contradictions. It is a pursuit of change, movement, and a non-essentialising way of approaching the world and society. We invite our readers and experiencers to join us in this ongoing movement!

We thank all the artist-researcher and the peer-reviewers for their invaluable contribution to this issue.

http://ruukku-journal.fi/en/issues/20/editorial

Rovaniemi is home to culturally significant trees and green areas, which are highlighted in this exhibition, exploring their history and present through a publication. The exhibition “TREES, PARKS, PEOPLE” is the result of collaboration among 11 artists and visual creators from various fields. The exhibition features photographs, lithographs, videos, sculptures, and installations. Additionally, there is a community art piece created by around sixty tree enthusiasts, showcasing photographs of trees that are to be preserved. The participating artists and visual creators are Miina Alajärvi, Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja, Panu Johansson, Hilkka Liikkanen, Mervi Löfgren Autti, Mari Mäkiranta, Kirsikka Paakkinen, Karoliina Paatos, Eila Puhakka, Kaisa Sirén, and Jukka Suvilehto.

Old trees have witnessed much, and each generation forms a new relationship with them. Trees are also an important part of people’s, cities’, and even nations’ identities, as they hold many stories, experiences, and lives. The artists in the exhibition express, through their works, the shock that arises from the felling of a nearby forest or an individual elderly tree. The grief is entirely justified, as within our lifetime, we simply cannot witness a newly planted tree reaching its full age. The lifespan of a tree can exceed human lifespan several times over; while our lives on Earth come to an end, the life of a tree is just beginning.

Poster image: Mari Mäkiranta
The exhibition has been granted by the Finnish Cultural Foundation

Mari Mäkiranta & Flowing Waters collective, 2022, Twenty-five kilometres walk, video 5:46 min (short version). Performative walk and video filmed near Kittilä’s goldmine in Finnish Lapland. Under the road is a pipe for the polluted water from the mine. Polluted waste water runs in river near by the Levi tourist center.

Mari Mäkiranta & Flowing Waters collective, Water and Soil, ink-jet photography, 2022. Water and soil samples from the polluted rivers near mining industries in Northern Finland.

Mari Mäkiranta & Flowing Waters collective, Scientists at work, ink-jet photography, 2022

Mari Mäkiranta, Being in the Air I-III, 2022.

Gallery Exhibition curated by: Pirjetta Brander
Kide-journal: Editor in chief: Marjo Laukkanen
Lay-out: Reetta Linna

Mari Mäkiranta, Corona guys, 2021.

During the covid 19 I started to photograph my neighbourhood men living on my home street. These men, like many of us, needed to stay isolated during the pandemia.

Group exhibition in collaboration with Satu Miettinen, Taina Kontio & Melanie Sarantou 21.12.2019–26.1.2020

Mari Mäkiranta, Fallen I-III, 2020.

Poster Design by Meri Heikkilä

Visible Grounds exhibition and art curating in collaboration with Professor Eija Timonen and Kalevala Society, Valo Gallery, Rovaniemi, Finland 18.10.–9.11.2017.

Photograph by: Marko Junttila

My photography series On Foreign Grounds in a group exhibition in the Faculty of Art and Design, University of Lapland. The exhibition was curated by the director of the Photographic Gallery Hippolyte Henna Harri.

Mari Mäkiranta, On Foreign Grounds I-II, 2017.