Art for Art’s Sake screening series continues at Cinema Orion on March 11th exploring themes of habitation and belonging

The beloved Art for Art’s Sake screening series is back! The first screening of the year takes place on Tuesday, 11th of March 2025 and explores themes of habitation and belonging. On various scales, the city as well as dynamics and relations between spaces, places, and humans and non-humans are at the core of the line up. The program opens with Lasse Vairio’s new live cinema performance Seaweed Suburb, which features footage of Vuosaari area’s surroundings and examines how marine life and people in the suburbs are affected by large-scale infrastructure projects. Alli Savolainen’s Embroidery zooms out and shows how light pollution shimmers as embroidery over the planet. In Lauri Astala’s Sketch for the Last Map images of overlapping, translucent indoor and outdoor spaces around the world chronicle the multi-layerdness and placelessness of our world in the digital era. Denise Ziegler’s Fredrikinkatu presents us an experimental portrait of a street located in the Helsinki city center. Jaakko Pietiläinen’s Housing Fair is set in a typical suburban residential area, where all residents have evaporated and autonomous home appliances are left behind to reminisce among themselves. The screening closes with Elina Saloranta’s Huone (by Elina Saloranta), which records the changes that took place in a bedroom after the death of a woman who lived there.

Art for Art’s Sake has since 2022 brought together artists’ moving image, media art and experimental film from Finland and around the world, novelties and classics. The series is coordinated by AV-arkki and curated by a working group consisting of Diego Ginartes, Sepideh Rahaa, Azar Saiyar and Avreno Heikka. The series has been supported by the Ministry of Education and Culture and the City of Helsinki. 

Admission to the Art for Art’s Sake screenings is free!

Films with dialogue are subtitled in English.


11.3.2025 | 17:0018:30 | Cinema Orion 

Lasse Vairio: Seaweed Suburb | 2025 | 25 min

Marine life and people in the suburbs are vulnerable victims to large infrastructure projects and their inconspicuous by-products. The name of the performance is an imaginary underwater suburb of Helsinki. The footage mainly consists of Vuosaari’s surroundings, both on land and below the surface. Characters to follow can be found on both sides of the shoreline: above the surface people live and work and below the surface water invertebrates live among the delicate kelp colonies. 


Alli Savolainen: Embroidery | 2006 | 1 min 25 sec

Embroidery

Selected embroidery of Mother Earth.

Lauri Astala: Sketch for the Last Map | 2022 | 12 min 50 sec

Sketch for the Last Map

In the core of Sketch for he Last Map, overlapping translucent indoor and outdoor spaces relate to the multi-layered and placeless world in our digital era. Many faces of cities – private spaces, less “public” realities, cleared, restricted or fenced off out of sight – stay excluded from maps and the stream of images. The work was shot in several cities in Belgium, South Korea, India, France, Turkey and Uruguay.

Denise Ziegler: Fredrikinkatu | 1999 | 4 min 26 sec

Fredrikinkatu

Fredrikinkatu is a portrait of a street located in the Helsinki city center. The images are shot following the ‘pars pro toto’ principle (a part stands for the whole). On the soundtrack you hear an audio cross-section from one end of the street to the other. The video is edited straight in the camera.

Jaakko Pietiläinen: Housing Fair | 2018 | 10 min 50 sec

The work is set in a typical suburban residential area, where all residents have evaporated. Autonomous home appliances, such as service robots, intelligent refrigerators, robotic lawnmowers and self-guided cars, consume their time, maintain their surroundings, and think back on the missing humans.

Elina Saloranta: Huone (by Elina Saloranta) | 2008 | 9 min

Huone (by Elina Saloranta)

The video work records the changes that took place in a bedroom after the death of a woman who lived there. The work begins with the text: “After the mother died, it took six months to sell the flat. The daughter went there once a week to have a cup of coffee.” Slowly changing images follow. The first picture shows the room untouched, only the bed linen has been removed. Little by little, the space gets emptier until only one piece of furniture is left: an enormous old-fashioned double bed. At the end, it’s surrounded by the belongings of the new inhabitants. On the soundtrack we hear footsteps, the clinking of a coffee cup and the whirring of an old vacuum cleaner. When a protective plastic cover is thrown over the bed, the vacuum cleaner slowly fades out, as if breathing.


The duration of the screening is approximately one hour.

The screening is followed by a discussion with the artists Lasse Vairio, Elina Saloranta and Denise Ziegler.


AV-arkki has promoted and distributed Finnish media art since 1989. AV-arkki’s promotional efforts have made the artists’ participation in this event possible. If you want to hear the latest news from our distribution, subscribe to our newsletter!