This year, the Fiskars Village Art & Design Biennale takes place from 16 June to 1 September 2024, in Fiskars, Finland. In this former industrial zone rehabilitated by art and design, French artists Kim Farkas, Laura Gozlan, and Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann will be exhibited in Finland for the first time. Discover their work in Surprise Guest, one of the two main exhibitions of this event.
The exhibition’s themes are inspired by the spirit of the Finnish summer villa culture, at a time when city dwellers and their families moved to the countryside to spend summer days filled with leisure and work. Guests, invited or unannounced, often appeared on the doorstep. The Surprise Guest exhibition combines art and design to explore our social relationships through the hospitality we extend to a stranger under our roof.
Here, the villa is transformed into intimate exhibition rooms, where invited artists taking on the role of guests have left their imprints, disrupting the monotony of the hosts’ daily life. In this villa where doors do not exist, the public and the private, the interior and the exterior blend together, giving us the opportunity for introspection into our own social relationships and intimacy.
“Our private dwellings carry within themselves multiple notions worth exploring— affection and seduction, erasure and absence, which form the often overlooked or silenced narratives familiar from the backstage of our domestic lives.” – exhibition curator Sini Rinne-Kanto.
The biennial creates a dialogue between decoration and functionality in furniture, sculpture, installation, craft, moving image and sound that are representing the aesthetics, forms and materials of the Nordic design vocabulary.
French artist included in the exhibition:
Kim Farkas: Franco-American artist based in Paris, Kim Farkas graduated from Olivier de Serres and Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2014. To create his sculptures and paintings, made of a mix of transparency and layers of composite materials, Farkas draws inspiration from the intersections of counter-cultures and capitalist laboratories. His work explores the way in which cultural influences merge into commodities.
Laura Gozlan: Paris-based visual artist Laura Gozlan studied scenography at Helsinki’s University of Art and Design and EnsAD in Paris. She graduated from Le Fresnoy, National Studio of Contemporary Arts, where she studied with director Chantal Akerman. Gozlan questions social norms by exploring the aesthetics of ageing. Her films and installations outrageously depict moments of desire and satisfaction in contrasting and intimate settings.
Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann: Based in Paris, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts in 2006 and graduated with a masters in esthetic from Université de Paris 8 in 2024. Badaut Haussmann explores cinema, literature, architecture and design, which become through her art practice, platforms for social and political commentary, approaching subjects such as feminism and psychology. She often views the exhibition space itself as her primary medium.
For more information, visit the Fiskars Village Art & Design Biennale website.