We invite city residents to join us for this unique museum tour on Thursday, 23 November, from 17:00 to 22:00. In addition to exploring the exhibitions, visitors can enjoy thought-provoking art experiences. The museums will be open later than usual and are free for the duration of the event. The museums are within a short walking distance of each other, and you can experience a variety of atmospheres and enjoy unexpected encounters during the evening.
The event will be held in cooperation with the City of Helsinki’s Culture and Leisure Division and the museums. The city aims to help revive the arts scene, support artists and provide Helsinki residents with inspiring, free-of-charge cultural events, which will also increase the appeal of Helsinki’s city center.
At the darkest time of the year, we need energizing experiences! At the same time, we will offer cross-disciplinary work opportunities for artists and attract new visitors to museums. I hope that Helsinki residents will show up in large numbers and enjoy this unique tour, which the museums and artists have put together.
Circus acts, poetry and live music
The public will have the opportunity to explore the ongoing exhibitions and performances at the museums on the tour. The presentations and performances planned for the tour draw their inspiration from the wide range of exhibitions on display.
At the Design Museum’s Garden Futures exhibition, you can listen to stories that nature tells us about the future. Musicians Eva Väljaots & Robbie Sherratt provide an enchanting combination of kantele (a Finnish and Estonian stringed instrument), violin and vocals that exudes music rooted in Estonian and English folklore.
At HAM, Haegue Yang’s Handles collection will be brought to life four times during the evening under the direction of choreographer Eeva Juutinen. The artwork, covered in bells, will be moved around the exhibition hall, where we will simultaneously hear the composer Isang Yun’s musical work, Images.
In Villa Hakasalmi, Volker von Bonin’s nostalgic photographs of 1950–70s Helsinki will transform into dance and sound for the evening. Dancer-choreographers Tiia Hämäläinen and Jaakko Simola and sound artist Marika Hyvärinen invite visitors to smile with them as their performance spreads out into the atmospheric halls of the villa for the whole evening. Visitors can move through the exhibition spaces at their own pace.
The Helsinki City Museum will show you what happens to gym workouts when creativity takes over. The Race Horse Company’s action-packed show will feature juggling, acrobatics with a gymnastics ball, flying kettlebells, and a human gyroscope. At the City Museum, a juggler will welcome visitors to the Your Body – The Sweaty History of Gyms exhibition and amaze them as familiar sports gear wildly transforms into unusual stunt equipment.
At Helsinki Kunsthalle, visitors will be swept up by Latin American rhythms. The Brazilian Aeroplane band will play music by J. Karjalainen and Bo Kaspers with a Brazilian twist and in Portuguese. They will play well-known songs as a jazzy bossa nova, creating a joyful musical experience that celebrates the colourfulness, playfulness and richness of Kaija Aarikka’s art.
The K1 exhibition space at the Finnish Museum of Photography, in turn, lets us dive into the world of photographer Pentti Sammallahti’s Us Two exhibition while pausing for moments of poetry. During the evening, the actors Elsa Saisio and Nelly Kärkkäinen will interpret and sing poems that are important to Sammallahti and reflect the same beauty and connections between people, animals and nature that he captured in his photographs. During the last hour of the evening, Pentti Sammallahti will also be on-site to talk about the background and stories behind the photographs selected for the exhibition.