WUNDERKAMMER (2015)

WUNDERKAMMER

Galleria Huuto Jätkäsaari I & II, Helsinki
5 – 20 December 2015

Curator: Ville Laaksonen
Artists: Anna Hyrkkänen, Alisa Javits, Anna-Liisa Kankaanmäki, Maippi Ketola, Ninni & Tuomas Korkalo, Kristiina Ljokkoj, Petra Martinez, Leena Pukki, Anssi Pulkkinen, Elina Rantasu & Lauri Ainala, Outi Turpeinen

Project description:

Wunderkammer — German for Cabinet of Curiosities — was a group exhibition curated by Ville Laaksonen, exploring the enduring human fascination with the miraculous, the strange, and the unknown in contemporary art. The exhibition brought together thirteen artists selected from more than 150 open call submissions, presenting a rich diversity of works that formed a collective microcosm — a modern-day cabinet of imagination and wonder.

Historically, the Wunderkammer emerged in Renaissance Europe as an attempt to contain the world within a room — a collection of natural marvels, rare artefacts, and mysterious objects gathered to evoke awe and to demonstrate knowledge, power, and curiosity. These early cabinets existed at the intersection of science, art, and magic, long before disciplinary boundaries divided the empirical from the emotional.

In a contemporary context, Wunderkammer reinterprets this tradition not as a physical collection but as a psychological and perceptual space. The exhibition proposed that today’s art functions as a site where curiosity, imagination, and the inexplicable continue to coexist — not as nostalgia for the past, but as a living structure for sensing and thinking beyond rational limits.

Each artist’s work contributed to a composite experience where material form and mental image intertwined. The exhibition invited the viewer to enter a state of perceptual discovery: to move between the real and the imaginary, between order and chaos, between knowledge and wonder.

Wunderkammer thus became both a study of the microcosm of the human mind and a reflection on the artistic impulse to assemble, interpret, and re-enchant the world — a reminder that the miraculous has always been a fundamental part of human understanding, even within contemporary rationality.