‘Sustainability Is an Attitude’: On the Helsinki Biennial 2025

Recent years have seen a flurry of exhibitions on themes of ecological crisis and care. All the while, humans continue to burn through climate tipping points, torpedo biodiversity and plasticize the planet: harms to which the art world calendar of biennials and fairs certainly contributes. Are exhibitions suitable vehicles for these conversations? And how can such shows prioritize galvanizing change while fusing theory and praxis – and avoid devolving into mosscore?

The ecologically minded Helsinki Biennial, which has incorporated sustainability into its programme since its inception, launches its third edition on 8 June. Spanning Esplanade Park, Helsinki Art Museum (HAM) and Vallisaari – an island and former military base uninhabited by humans since the mid-1990s – ‘Shelter’ seeks, per the press release, to ‘shake us out of anthropocentrism’ and shed light on the ‘severely imbalanced relationship between humankind and nature’. Here, co-curators Blanca de la Torre (director of IVAM) and Kati Kivinen (head of exhibitions at HAM) discuss the biennial, their approach to sustainable curating and ‘good life’.

Cassie Packard What makes art a fruitful modality for challenging anthropocentrism or discussing ecological crisis?

Kati Kivinen One thing art can do is make scientific findings more accessible to a general audience – for example, it can demonstrate how plants and animals adapt to changing conditions. Many exhibitions on the loss of biodiversity or the climate crisis feel a bit like doomscrolling. You leave feeling hopeless. That is something we really wanted to avoid, because what we need in this situation is positive action.

The biennial’s title, ‘Shelter: Below and Beyond, Becoming and Belonging’, is inspired by the Vallisaari island’s botanically diverse ecosystem, which has been allowed to thrive free from human intervention for decades. It invited us to imagine what unfolds when other-than-human agents take the stage. There are also works in the exhibition that literally provide shelter – for example, Esplanade Park, another biennial venue this year, will feature massive bug hotels by Helsinki-based artists Kalle Hamm and Dzamil Kamanger, the latter of whom is originally from Iran.

Blanca de la Torre Art is a vehicle through which to create new narratives, and envision more optimistic climate futures. We need to reconsider our anthropocentric attitudes, and art’s capacity for storytelling can open a path for empathy toward other species. It’s crucial to underline that there won’t be any human protagonists in the artworks in ‘Shelter’. Interspecies encounters have been the focus of a spate of recent shows, but we wanted to place humans aside. We believe this is the first biennial to feature all nonhuman entities as main characters.

Consistency matters, and it was important to develop sustainable methodologies in order to ensure that what we do aligns with what we say. We call this a ‘slow biennial’. Our strict sustainability plan extends to the way we produce the biennial; for example, materials used should be locally sourced and nontoxic. Beyond managing the biennial’s carbon footprint, we are considering other footprints, like emotional footprints, and thinking about sustainability in a holistic way.

KK From our first edition in 2021, the biennial has aimed to be a sustainable art event. Part of that has to do with our connection to the city of Helsinki, which is trying to reach carbon neutrality by 2030.

BdlT In the 15 years I’ve been developing exhibitions with sustainability parameters, this was the first time I didn’t have to convince an institution to get on board – a luxury!

CP We all know that the art world circuit of biennials and fairs is carbon-intensive and wasteful. As the frequency of these events increases, we’ve seen an uptick in sustainability initiatives – around the time the Helsinki Biennial presented its first edition, the Venice Biennale announced a sustainability plan, and a few years later the climate-focused Klima Biennale launched in Vienna. How do you square sustainability concerns with the phenomenon of biennialization?

BdIT Of course it’s not an unproblematic model, to do a big exhibition every second or third year. But I don’t see doing nothing as an option. Artists should be able to show their work around the world, and people should be able to see it. You can change the game somewhat, from using ground transport for artworks to abstaining from taking a world tour for research. Of course, there are things in this business, let’s call it, that you can’t entirely avoid. The point is that sustainability is not a subject. It’s an attitude, a way to live in the world.

CP I see that you are striving to close the gap between theory and praxis – down to the inclusion of artists like Maria Thereza Alves, a founding member of the São Paolo Green Party, and functional objects like Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas’s peatland drainage systems. Your artist list is quite international and diverse. Giuseppe Penone was an interesting inclusion, in that Arte Povera is not often seen as existing in a continuum with today’s eco-art. Artist Katie Paterson was the first to point out that throughline to me.

KK About a third of the artists are from Finland and the Nordic countries, and Blanca involved a lot of artists from the Global South. There’s been a focus on ecological issues, multispecies approaches and interspecies philosophies in artistic discourse in the Nordic countries and Northern Europe for close to two decades, but when you look at works from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s – including by prominent artists like Agnes Denes and Nancy Holt – it’s clear that ecological issues have been close to artists’ hearts for a long time.

Of course, there’s more information available for artists now on eco-social transformation, transcending the anthropocentric paradigm and embracing a multispecies ethos amid rapid ecological degradation. We believe that biennials can be spaces of artistic expression, knowledge production and community-building, and that they have the potential to inspire transformative eco-social practices rather than engaging in mere eco-rhetoric.

BdlT. When I was head curator of the Cuenca Biennial in Ecuador, one of the principles of the sustainability decalogue that I created was ‘sumak kawsay’, which translates to ‘good life’.  It’s a concept in Quechua rooted in Indigenous Andean and Amazonian cultures that views humans as part of Pachamama or Mother Earth. It’s a paradigm based on understanding ecology in a holistic way, as involving the fulfilment of needs outside of economic growth and Western development.

Kati and I spent a long time speaking about this concept in relation to Northern countries and how we could translate this complex idea. For us it was important to show that it’s not just a matter of wellbeing or having a better quality of life, but a total change of priorities and the embracing of a different paradigm. With this exhibition, I want people to not only learn but feel. What we need at this point is for humans to become more empathetic toward the environment and the more-than-human agents living all around us – to look beyond our own belly buttons.

The 2025 Helsinki Biennial, ‘Shelter: Below and Beyond, Becoming and Belonging’, is on view from 8 June to 21 September

_{Main image: Laura Põld Külmking, Resting Within Puddles and Branches, 2025. Photograph: HAM / Helsinki Biennial / Maija Toivanen}