April 2025
Lux Helsinki: Juha Rouhikoski, and Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyvirta
Lines, Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyvirta, Installation view, 2025
In recent decades, we have radically transformed the concept of public space. In this light, Lux Helsinki channels the curatorial team and invites artists to make the most of an open map for redesigning landscape, territories, nature, and our relationship to them. Camilla Boemio spoke about the program with Juha Rouhikoski, the Artistic Director and Curator of Lux Helsinki, and duo artists Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyvirta.
Lines, Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyvirta, Installation view, 2025
Interview by Camilla Boemio
Camilla Boemio: Lux Helsinki 2025 took place across the city. It’s a light festival in Helsinki that is organized annually at the beginning of January. The festival presents a diverse range of light art. The idea of community seems to play a significant role in the festival. Will you introduce the mission of the festival? How are you involved in the selection of projects?
Juha Rouhikoski: Presenting light art in the urban environment in an event or festival context always makes it communal. There is an interaction between the artworks, surroundings, and audience. They all impact each other. The core mission of Lux Helsinki is to bring light to people’s lives during the darkest days in Finland. Once the Year changes, people’s New Year’s resolutions, wishes, and hopes for a better tomorrow and the future walk hand in hand with light. Light symbolizes all of that.
The process for selecting the works is complicated. In general, all of the works relate somehow to the festival’s theme, but there are many variables. Locations, permits, budgets, and commercial partners are all parts of the puzzle.
CB: The Community has a decisive role in the program. What values emerge in the arts partnership program and its policy-making process?
JR: Lux Helsinki has listed specific values to follow, and this value chart provides helpful guidelines for the curatorial process. We also want our artists and partners to follow these values, whether they relate to energy consumption, sustainability, equality, etc.
The festival’s theme can involve political messaging, but is never blatant. Theme is a tool for curators and artists to refine the content of the works. Once it becomes political, it’s fine as long as it follows the festival’s values. Freedom of expression is the key point.
Lines, Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyvirta, Installation view, 2025
CB: For Robert Smithson, “Nature is never finished”. In LinesHelsinki, the artists Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyyirta developed an immersive experience in five locations. Will you introduce them?
JR: Finding the best location possible for Timo’s and Pekka’s work was essential. We worked for almost three years to find a suitable place for Lines. The area spreads across the coastline, and part of it goes beyond the coastline to the nearby islands. A dystopian future, whereby our landscape is underwater, and needs a location next to water. Working with delicate and minimalistic light sources requires the surroundings and the environment to be as dark as possible. Kaivopuisto, where we placed the work, was a perfect place. Lux Helsinki has never used that location, which gives it a fresh and new aspect.
CB: Timo and Pekka have a collaborative practice, for example, the 2019 installation in Scotland entitled Lines (57° 59′ N, 7° 16’W) brings greater awareness to the risks of sea-level rise. With Lines, installed at the Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre in Lochmaddy on the island of North Uist, you explore nature and the catastrophic impacts of climate change. What does it mean to be a duo of artists? How do you organize and divide each part of the project?
Timo and Pekka: We have known each other since the late 80s and shared the same interests growing up. Maybe a year or two before our first collaborative installation at North Uist, we had long conversations overseas (as Timo was studying in the Glasgow School of Art’s environmental art department) and started thinking of ways to work together in the public realm. So, we could describe collaboration as an extension of a long friendship. As we both have our artistic practices, collaboration merges both of our practices. It means long conversations over the phone, meetups, taking walks, and doing things together. It is a dialogue that evolves through the input of both participants.
To organize, we share tasks. Pekka comes from a photography background and is more handy with image processing, so he usually makes the final blueprints for the projects. On the other hand, Timo comes from a sculpture/installation background and might make initial sketches by drawing. Then there is once again a conversation and bouncing ideas. We have started to work organically. We both know and have our strengths. We aim to reach a meaningful and unique outcome by merging our strengths.
Lines, Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyvirta, Installation view, 2025
CB: You presented Lines at Lux Helsinki 2025. You realized it in five locations with site-specific light installations visualizing the sea level rise caused by global warming. The immersive experience explores the interactions between humans and nature and the environmental impacts of climate change. Can you introduce this project and the five locations where you installed it?
T & P: The work comprises five parts (installations) split into “epochs” within a timeline. We tied each epoch to a slowly evolving sea level rise at various times in the future.
According to the IPCC’s low confidence AR6 scenario, the storm surges will reach the line of light at Särkkä island breakwater by 2065 and the observatory, reaching 20.1m as early as 2500. We based the work on a timeline that is not too far in the future, when we think of the end of the last ice age some 12,000 years ago. We are amplifying natural processes on a massive scale through collective actions.
The list of locations in chronological order from the earliest to the last is as follows:
The Breakwater. 2.1 m above sea level. It could be under high water as early as 2065.
The Gallen Willow. 4.1 m. Under high water in 2110.
The Maples. 5.6 m. Under high water in the 2140s.
The Glacial Erratic Boulder. 8.8 m. Under high water before 2300.
The Observatory. 20,1 m. Under high water, possibly as early as 2500
Lux Helsinki allowed us to propose a location for this specific work, and as Helsinki is home to both of us, we spent a lot of time figuring out and working towards the outcome of this project. Much of the work was carried out well before the event due to the possible harsh weather conditions in early January 2025. Särkkä island was ready by the end of October 2024, before the freezing sea, and the Observatory in late November, before the first snow.
Lines, Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyvirta, Installation view, 2025
Lines, Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyvirta, Installation view, 2025
CB: What can art do to fight climate change?
T & P: Art can translate ideas that graphs and math (science) may fall short of. It can bring the topic closer to people with other types of knowledge than numbers. Especially with our work Lines, the work can make the effects of climate change more tangible to the viewer. Art has the potential to raise awareness and act as a catalyst for broader conversation about the topic.
CB: What is more important for art, the idea or the execution?
T & P: The following equation perhaps illustrates our collaborative process
ART = location/topic → analysis/creative process → execution = ART
CB: Tell me more about your poetic and minimalist approach to societal and ecological issues in public spaces.
T & P: The light line is as minimalist as possible. It plays with the semiotics, or the visual language of advertising and overconsumption, which is one of the main reasons for the climate crisis. One can see the poetics and outcome of this minimalist approach. Recently, our approach has been to work at the intersection of public space and broader socio-political topics.
Lines, Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyvirta, Installation view, 2025
CB: What came from the interaction with the public?
T & P: As the climate-related topic raises emotional responses, we see the conversation around the project as positive. The vast majority recognized the climate crisis as an urgent matter we must tackle, as the topic is here to stay.
CB: What makes public art sublime?
JR: In most cases, context is the matter that makes something art. If you call it art, it will be art. If someone disagrees, we deal with art that raises questions, making it even more compelling. There are specific values that are essential before we can call something art.
Standing the time makes an art piece good public art. Good public art doesn’t open up immediately. Good urban art gives new angles and perspectives daily, and speaks with its surroundings and audience in surprising ways.
Timo Aho (b. 1980, Finland) works with sculpture, installation- and site-specific art. In his work, Aho uses a wide range of materials and media, often including ephemeral elements such as light, air and sound. His artistic practice investigates our environment through societal structures and belief systems. Examining the fine line between reality and fiction, Aho disentangles these topics with subtle gestures.
Pekka Niittyvirta works at the intersection of installation, photography, video, and alternative image technologies — blurring the boundaries of experimental, conceptual, and documentary work. Through several aesthetically and substantively divergent projects, Niittyvirta views our socially constructed realities critically.
Juha Rouhikoski is Lux Helsinki’s artistic director and curator. He holds a Master’s degree in theatre and drama and is currently pursuing a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. He works as production manager at Verkatehdas in Hämeenlinna, and he is passionate about exercise, fly fishing and self-development.
Camilla Boemio is an internationally published author, curator, and member of the AICA (International Arts Critics) based in Rome.