13.-23.9.Ulla Kirsikka Nurminen: Messages - An exhibition of rugs and other works

Ulla Kirsikka Nurminen: Messages

An exhibition of rugs and other works

13–23 September 2026 @ Asbestos Art Space (Kristianinkatu 16, Helsinki)

Opening Sunday 13 September, 13:00–19:00

Open Wed–Mon 13:00–19:00 (closed on Tuesdays)

Ulla Kirsikka Nurminen (b. 1973) is a Helsinki-born multimodal gladiator of fashion and design, a third-generation craftsperson emerging from a working-class/actor dynasty. Her trajectory towards becoming a full-spectrum artist is, to put it mildly, an anomalous one. But judge for yourselves:

The passionate image-making of her early adolescence gradually surrendered to the increasingly self-propelled existence of a matriculated young woman, as the supposedly more sensible textile industry abducted her under cover of vocational legitimacy. She proceeded to give birth to futuristic fashion collections and a multitude of customised avatars for various self-directed human entities, leaving permanent retinal bruises on the collective memory of Helsinki-centric techno culture around the millennium, while simultaneously infiltrating the body-image departments of the more ordinary layers of the population through a handful of fashion magazines and, occasionally, directly into private wardrobes.

Her subsequent career at Marimekko pushed the creative organism towards increasingly abstract manifestations of agency in the fields of handicraft and applied arts. Yet eventually the largest force of all, LOVE, leapt from behind a tree after fifteen years and chased the artist back to her native Finland, back to the roots, where she could finally become an autonomous artist in her own right, having, alongside her commercial occupation, undergone an extended initiation into the total ecosystem of contemporary art in Berlin.

At that precise moment, linearity itself was assigned a Y-value somewhere on the tabloid horizon, following the ultimate graph that certain primitive civilizations refer to as “life”. Consequently, the weighting factor of the first component in the compound noun applied arts began, during the quarterly software updates of globalist economic growth programmes, to asymptotically approach the perfectly zero-shaped aperture of nothingness.

Which is, frankly, where things start getting interesting.

Following a number of temporary expert appointments within the fashion-industrial complex, Ulla Kirsikka eventually found herself operating from an arte povera-adjacent position, representing her country of origin on the red carpets of film festivals across several continents. There she reached the elementary yet apparently underfunded conclusion that nobody is, in fact, a prophet in their own country, which at the time happened to be Germany.

Nurminen’s return from the Excel-based civilisation of numerical domination to the soft fingerprints of hard hands coincided with a return to the misty embrace of birch forests on the outer edge of a small Päijät-Häme town. This was a departure from the urban jungle, which had been thoroughly desiccated by the COVID pandemic and which, from the hunter-gatherer perspective, had once been known as an excessively stocked warehouse of spiritual nourishment and raw materials for the Great Culinary Wars.

The modernist conception of art turning towards the “Orientalist” may, in magical-realist terms, have something to do with the North Pole continuously leaking south-eastward towards Lake Baikal. In this ongoing geographical malfunction, the words deconstruction, post-apocalyptic alchemy, tradition and ethnofuturism become entangled with the comprehension of comprehending how to handle whatever happens to be at hand, and only that, arising from idleness, which another person might optimistically describe as freedom.

Since I am writing about the exhibition of my bandmate (Ulla Kirsikka is also a singer), I feel obliged to ask: Have you heard the ancient joke about the humppa drummer and the jazz drummer meeting at the bar? The jazz drummer leans over the counter and asks: “Do ya get it? Get it? Get it? Get it?” The humppa drummer looks him dead in the eye: “Don’tcha get it? Don’tcha get it? Don’tcha get it? Don’tcha get it?” Neither of them gets it. They both get the beat. :^D

Allow me, therefore, to celebrate on your behalf: the incomprehensibly magnificent first solo exhibition by Ulla Kirsikka Nurminen channels, above all, the innocent psychic landscape of dream records captured during her childhood, deploying the formidable material intelligence, formal perception, chromatic muscle and manual coordination of a summa cum laude graduate of the School of Life, while simultaneously declaring war on everything old, ugly and conventionally well-behaved.

In other words:

WARNING: NOT FOR THE COLOUR-BLIND!

These images contain colour shocks.

They may also contain residual traces of quantum-mechanical kundalini tremors, stray fragments of post-apocalyptic chromatic radiation, and, possibly, the unedited pheromones of an intact kitten.

No refunds.

– Jarkko Olavi Räsänen

Ulla’s website: http://huisujake.com/u/

The work in the photo:

Ulla Kirsikka Nurminen: "Dream-Dog's Home", wool rug, 115 x 84 cm, 2026