Saara Ekström’s exhibition “Designing with Nature” is part of the visual arts programme at Münsterland Festival. The exhibition is open in the Kolvenburg castle from August 20 to November 5 2023.

Finnish artist Saara Ekström creates multi-layered experiences for the viewer in her photographs, video works, sculptures and drawings. Her works are characterised by associative narratives that move in interplay between reality and fiction, growth and disappearance or the seductive and the repulsive. Various chronotopias – i.e. connections between time and space in a narrative – are placed in dialogue in her works. In the process, time is sometimes the breeding ground, sometimes the undermining of actions and thoughts, so that the ambivalent desire for memory on the one hand and forgetting on the other is reflected.

Again and again, motifs from nature appear in the exhibition curated by Dominik Olbrisch, which enter into a relationship of tension with motifs from industry, human actions or supernatural phenomena. The exhibition is made possible by Frame Contemporary Art Finland.

Saara Ekström works in film, photography, text and installation. Chronotopes where time and place densify, time that nurtures and erodes, the ambivalent desire to both remember and forget are at the core of her art. Ekström’s work has been shown extensively in various museums and festivals in Europe, the Americas and Asia. She received the Finnish media art prize AVEK-award in 2018 and the prizes of SW Finland in 2017, Finnish Art Society in 1995 and the Aboa prize in 1994. She has been the Helsinki Festival Artist in 2005 and was nominated for both Ars Fennica and Carnegie Art Award prizes in 2010.

Saara Ekström: Designing with Nature, August 20 – November 5 2023, Kolvenburg castle, Billerbeck, Germany

More information: Münsterland Festival

Still from: Saara Ekström: Body All Eyes (2018)

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!