The second Art for Art’s Sake screening of the Spring season continues around the theme of belonging. The films in the screening titled …to this place called earth consider what a sense of belonging means, and how it might persist regardless of a geographic distance. The screening also looks at the power relations and dynamics of belonging by exploring the narrative, technological and symbolic means through which the experience of belonging or a sense of connection emerges or is fabricated, and how, on the other hand, that process may be brutally disturbed, or purposefully (creatively) disrupted.
The screening opens with Sasha Huber’s video performance Louis Who? What you should know about Louis Agassiz (2010), in which Huber rides to Praça Agassiz to inform passers-by about the racist ideology of the Swiss-born American biologist and geologist Louis Agassiz, according to whom the square is named. The second film, A Metamorphosis (2025) by Lin Htet Aung, which won a Tiger Short Award at International Film Festival Rotterdam this year, presents us with a hypnotic counter-broadcast of sorts, inspired by childhood experiences of living under dictatorship. Marikki Hakola’s work Telephone (1990) visualizes the experience of living in a totalitarian information society, where communication leads to disconnection. Elian Mikkola’s Via Karelia (2021) is an experimental investigation into the filmmaker’s Karelian roots, generational trauma, and questions of identity. Mike Hoolboom’s film Nazareth (2020) through a single photograph taken in 1948 sheds light to the horrors of the Nakba*. Martín Baus’ film collage ABAJO Y A LA IZQUIERDA (2025) features music by Luis Terror Días and voices of rebel radios from Latin America and the Caribbean, attempting to portray a concrete, imagined and desired territory that is situated “below and to the left” of the hegemonic world mapping. ¡Liberación para todos!
* Nakba refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1947–49, during which the Zionist movement expelled over 700,000 Palestinians, emptied over 530 villages, and destroyed the foundations of Palestinian society.
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.
Art for Art’s Sake: …to this place called earth
6.5.2025 at 17.00 | Cinema Orion
The duration of the screening is approximately an hour. After the screening Sasha Huber and Marikki Hakola will be present to discuss their works and practice.
Sasha Huber: Louis Who? What you should know about Louis Agassiz
2010 | 03:50
In Louis Who? What you should know about Louis Agassiz, the viewer is confronted by the history of colonialism and oppression as created by Louis Agassiz. Like a messenger from times past, Sasha Huber enters the picture on a gleaming black horse, telling the passers-by of Praça Agassiz, in the suburbs of Rio, about the person who gave the square its name: “Scientist, naturalist, glaciologist, influential racist, pioneering thinker of apartheid…”
Sasha Huber (b. 1975) is a Helsinki-based internationally recognised visual artist-researcher of Swiss-Haitian heritage. Huber’s work is concerned with the politics of memory, care and belonging in relation to colonial residues left in the environment. Connecting history and the present, she uses and responds to archival material within a layered creative practice that encompasses performance-based reparative interventions, video, photography, and collaborations. Huber also usurps the staple gun, aware of its symbolic significance as a weapon, while offering the potential to renegotiate unequal power dynamics and the possibility of repair, symbolically stitching wounds together (pain-things). Known for her artistic research contribution to the “Demounting Louis Agassiz” campaign, she is aiming at reassessing the glaciologist’s contentious racist heritage. She holds an MA in visual culture from Aalto University in Helsinki and is presently undertaking a practice-based PhD in artistic research at Zurich University of the Arts. Huber also works in a creative partnership with artist Petri Saarikko.
Lin Htet Aung: A Metamorphosis
2025 | 16:43
In the houses, after parting, Mothers were made up of tears. Sons were transformed into empty glass cups. And the lullabies became a curse. The film examines the suffering and resilience of the Burmese people by using the distinct political elements that have floated for several years on the ocean of political opera under repetitive military dictatorships in Myanmar.
Lin Htet Aung (b. 1998), from Myanmar. His short films have been selected at several international film festivals, and in 2025, he won the Tiger Short Award at IFFR. An alumnus of Berlinale Talents, Locarno Filmmakers Academy, Asian Film Academy, and a Prince Claus Seed Awardee, he is now developing his debut feature, Making A Sea.
Marikki Hakola: Telephone
1990 | 08:56
Telephone is a dystopia about people who gradually lose contact with each other under the pressure of the totalitarian information society. Spoken words echo in the endless technological environment without reaching their destination. Telephone is based on the PIIPÄÄ performance (1987).
Marikki Hakola is a media artist, film director and producer. She graduated as a visual artist from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 1984, after she began working with video and performance art in 1982. Since then, Hakola has completed numerous video and multimedia art works, installations, music and dance films as well as performances. Hakola is an internationally recognized pioneer of European media art, with her work appearing at many exhibitions, festivals and TV channels. Her pieces are found in collections throughout several international art museums. Hakola has also taught film and media art in Finnish arts universities.
Elian Mikkola: Via Karelia
2021 | 12:35
Tracing back a lost identity, hidden in the forests of an abandoned war zone. How does trauma get carried on from a generation to another and is there a way to stop the cycle? The filmmaker tries to understand how to heal from the pressures of the past by searching for their grandmother’s childhood home. Taking the journey with their parents, they find themselves in a village located in the old Karelia, now a part of Russia.
Elian Mikkola is a Finnish Moving Image Artist (of Karelian descent), and a white settler currently based between Treaty 4, Regina, and Montréal (Tiohtià:ke), Canada. Originally from Turku, Finland, Mikkola holds a BA in Journalism from Tampere University. They completed their MFA in Media Production in 2019 at the University of Regina.
Mikkola works closely with both analogue and digital mediums and explores themes such as memory, spatial dependencies and queer belonging. They’ve done extensive research in the field of eco-processed film since 2017.
Mikkola’s experimental work has been showcased at several film festivals in Canada and internationally, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Oberhausen, and TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten. Mikkola has also showcased their Expanded Cinema work internationally in diverse exhibition environments.
Mikkola is a current board member of the WNDX Festival of Moving Image.
Mike Hoolboom: Nazareth
2020 | 06:36
A return to the fateful year of 1948 in Israel, reframed by a single photograph that is reviewed one face at a time. Four figures on a hillside bear witness to the revolutionary society, the new state, the new law. Like too many moments of catastrophe it is filled with invisibility charms and ghost relations. How to speak of what can’t be put into words, how to show what cannot be seen?
Born: Korean War, the pill, hydrogen bomb, playboy mansion. 1980s: Film emulsion fetish and diary salvos. Schooling at the Funnel: collective avant-geek cine utopia. 1990s: failed features, transgressive psychodramas, questions of nationalism. 2000s: Seroconversion cyborg (life after death), video conversion: feature-length, found footage bios. Fringe media archaeologist: author/editor/co-editor 30 books. Curator: 30 programs + Pleasure Dome co-founder. Copyleft yes. Occasional employments: artistic director Images Fest, fringe distribution Canadian Filmmakers. 100+ film/vids. 20 features. 89 awards, 20 international retrospectives. 5 lifetime achievement awards.
Mike Hoolboom began making movies in 1980. Making as practice, a daily application. Ongoing remixology. Since 2000 there has been a steady drip of found footage bio docs. The animating question of community: how can I help you? Interviews with media artists for 3 decades. Monographs and books, written, edited, co-edited. Local ecologies. Volunteerism. Opening the door.
Martín Baus: ABAJO Y A LA IZQUIERDA
2025 | 13:40
A film collage that attempts to delineate a concrete, imagined and desired territory that is situated “below and to the left” of the hegemonic world mapping. Photographs taken in Cerro Blanco- Guayaquil, a territory whose protection and destruction are both administered by the Swiss building materials company HOLCIM, meet the voices of rebel radios from Latin America and the Caribbean clamoring for the liberation of the land.
Martín BAUS (Santiago de Chile, 1992) is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, musician, researcher and teacher. His artistic practice investigates the relationships between history, materialism and perception, uniting his interest in the political dimensions of listening, the re-appropriation of archives and the procedures of translation between materialities such as celluloid, sound and text. He is a member of CEIS8, a collective for experimentation with film formats and photochemical processes based in Santiago de Chile, and co-director of the independent record label Radio Fome, which releases improvisation-based music and sound pieces. He’s interested in aurality as a tool for a radical pedagogy from Latin America and as a methodology for artistic and practice-based research. He enjoys engaging with the sonic realm from socio-political and non-sonorous approaches, which is why he has created poetry books related to listening and wording; text installations that engage with opaque language translation procedures; publications around the links between salsa rhythms, migration and working-class struggles; and fictional writings that speculate on the future of sound archives and digital archaeology.