Ilkka Halso

The Art of Renewal

Ilkka Halso | Nanna Hänninen | Sandra Kantanen

Opening: Saturday, 28 June 2 - 6 pm

Exhibition: 28 June - 30 August 2025

Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 35, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects is pleased to announce its summer exhibition, The Art of Renewal, bringing together works by the three Helsinki School artists Nanna Hänninen, Ilkka Halso, and Sandra Kantanen—whose conceptual approach to their photographic based practices has engaged deeply with ecological concerns over the past two decades. Through their unique interventions, each artist seeks to symbolically restore nature to what has been lost due to climate change, human neglect and urban encroachment. By altering images of real landscapes, they draw attention to pressing environmental issues, both present and future, blurring the line between the real and the imaginary. Their works use paradoxical situations to emphasize the reality of ecological degradation – barren landscapes infused with color, nature artificially preserved within protective structures, and untamed urban meadows transformed into surreal landscapes.

The Helsinki School Perspective

Opening: Friday, 30 June 2023, 6 – 8 pm

Exhibition: 1 July – 9 September 2023

Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 34 and 35, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects warmly welcomes you to our summer exhibition: The Helsinki School Perspective. The show is presented in both gallery spaces Lindenstr. 34 and 35, featuring a selection of artists, all of whom had pivotal roles in the beginning of the Helsinki School. The exhibition is dedicated to the historical aspect, exploring how these artists use the photographic processes as a voice for abstraction and a tool for interpreting their emotional landscapes. The Helsinki School platform was created by Timothy Persons in the 1990s, who became inspired by his experience with the Open Studio Concept that was popular during his graduate studies in the mid-1970s in Southern California. It grew to become the most extended sustainable educational platform of its kind consisting of 6 generations of selected MA students originating from the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland. There are now more than 180 monogram books and 6 volumes of the Helsinki School book that have evolved from this program. This exhibition is curated to reintroduce a new perspective on the conceptual roots that built The Helsinki School.

By the Morning, the Butterfly Was Gone

Ilkka Halso | Sanna Kannisto | Sandra Kantanen | Mikko Rikala

Opening: Friday, 1 July 2022, 6 – 8 pm

Exhibition: 2 July – 3 September 2022
Venue: Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 34, 10969 Berlin

Persons Projects is proud to present four artists from The Helsinki School who challenge pressing questions concerning the fragility of our ecosystem. In a world that is facing rapid changes in industry and capitalism, how can one reconnect with nature? What does it mean to slow down, to focus on the unseen, and appreciate nature’s temporality? These artists are among those few who remain in dialogue with nature, making a radical decision to treat our ecosystem with respect and to strengthen the human connection to it. They see that nature is unpredictable, asking if anything is predetermined. Rather than trying to control and suppress our environment – much like the large corporations fuelling climate change – Halso, Kannisto, Kantanen, and Rikala work with the unreliability of the landscape, embracing it to further cement our relationship with it.

Illka Halso | The Museum of Nature

Opening: 28 June 2019, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: 29 June – September 2019

"I plan and visually construct buildings, which will protect nature from threats of pollution and what is more important, from actions of man. (...) when putting nature into a museum, you have to take under consideration the aspect of the audience/consumer. Nature becomes a joyride for tourists or a beautiful landscape turns into a meditative theatre show.”

- Ilkka Halso