Henna-Riikka Halonen explores our relationship to materials, objects, language as well as to living and non-living beings. In her latest video work, technology leaks into everything, creating a porous, flooded world. Buoyant Force (2025, 6:50 min) is a ruin of the future, a museum, or a laboratory. It asks how to create a fictional sense of a world that is not yet here, but that may approach us from the future.
The work is grounded in a long and layered process in which Halonen has trained generative AI using her own paintings and digital collages in order to detach the resulting imagery from the generic stream of images. Rather than pursuing efficiency, the point of departure has been to bend the AI toward a more alien and surprising mode of expression — toward a crooked world and ecosystem of its own. In the translucent, pastel-toned hybrid world that emerges from this process, the boundaries between the digital and material realities blur, and bodies merge with technological devices. The work brings to the surface half-dissolved bodies, flesh, stone, strange beings, remnants, and warnings. The experience is ethereal and futuristic in an unexpected way.
Yet where does this futurity belong? Not in the gleam of utopia, but in the dirty, refracted places where shadows persist. This future is multiple: watery, technological, post-planetary. It is a clearing, breaking, an unmaking. It invites us to dive in, to blend with it— and to perhaps fail in imagining what is not yet ours to imagine.
The production of the film is supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, and the music is composed by Kyösti Salokorpi.
The exhibition is supported by the Finnish Heritage Agency.
Henna-Riikka Halonen (b. 1975) is a Helsinki-based visual artist and researcher whose multidisciplinary practice spans video, performance, installation, drawing, and text. Her works often emerge in response to a specific place or context and invite reflection on how we construct experience through fiction—blurring the boundaries between the material and the virtual, the human and the non-human, language and environment. Halonen received her MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, London, in 2006, and completed her Doctorate in Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, in 2020. In recent years, her work has been presented at several international festivals and exhibitions, including Gus Fisher Gallery, New Zealand (2024), Das Weisse Haus, Vienna (2025), and the Hangzhou Biennale, China (2025). Halonen currently teaches at Turku Arts Academy and works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki.
