Feminists Don’t Wear Pink (and other lies)
MEET THE ARTISTS
Jenni Österdlund
Jenni Österlund is a fiber artist, performer, and cultural producer based in Vaasa. Jenni took her Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Novia University of Applied Sciences in Jakobstad in 2021. Since then, she has been focused on exhibitions, as well as participating in collaborative projects and group shows.
Rooted in a small-town, post-nature, feminist context, her work sits at the intersection of decorative and conceptual art, exploring themes like rurality, material hierarchies, feminist theory and nature as a cultural concept. She works with textiles, paper, and plant fibers—soft, domesticated materials, chosen intentionally as a counterpoint to the functional, masculine materials that seem to dominate.
Her most recent solo exhibition, The Female Urge to Identify as a Garden, is a post-garden installation that reflects on the garden as a feminine space situated between nature and culture. The work was shown in both Vaasa and Helsinki and was featured in Suboart Magazine.
Jenni has been working, exhibiting and performing in Finland, France, and Italy, Sardinia, Norway. As a cultural producer, she has curated several festivals, exhibitions, and club events, with a strong focus on creating high-quality content within a small-town context.
https://www.instagram.com/jennlinneaosterlund/
Elina Lehtoranta
I am a visual artist and Master of Arts based in Helsinki. I have studied at institutions such as the Turku Arts Academy and Aalto University. My work spans multiple methods and disciplines, including both media art and painting.
My artworks reflect my personal lived experiences, often incorporating a self-portrait approach where I serve as both the subject and the creator. I use humor as a key element in my artistic expression, weaving it into the framework of my works. In my photography, for example, I favor constructed imagery, creating staged scenes within my own environment.
Many of my spatial and temporal works, such as photographs and experimental films, revolve around themes of femininity and sexuality.
http://www.elinalehtoranta.com
https://www.instagram.com/elina_lehtoranta/
Gloria Velasco
Gloria Velasco (b. 1992, Mexico) is an art historian and visual artist whose work merges intimate themes with symbolic expression. Currently based in Helsinki, Finland, she is in her third year of painting studies at Vapaa Taidekoulu (Free Art School).
https://www.instagram.com/gloriavelascoart
Lore Kuuskala
I am a Helsinki–based writer, illustrator, and multidisciplinary visual artist. My practice centers around storytelling through various mediums with an emphasis on the queer and neurodivergent experience. The interplay between connection and disconnection is a recurring theme in my work and my approach to different subjects often playful and poetic. Along with my artistic practice I study creative writing in the Theatre Academy Helsinki and work with contemporary art and audiences in the Finnish National Gallery.
https://www.instagram.com/kuuskala
Taru Rantanen
I am an artist, tattooist, and graphic designer from Loimaa. In my art, I often explore emotions rooted in animal and environmental themes, flavored with irony and dark humor. The subjects of my works tend to revolve around the border between life and death. My favorite techniques include ink, acrylic or watercolor painting, and linocut printmaking. I enjoy daydreaming, spending time in nature, beautiful things, music that can be sung loudly, fantasy series, and all kinds of animals.
https://www.instagram.com/tarujuliaaa/
Ana Grigorescu
I am Ana Grigorescu, a contemporary artist attracted to art which blends minimalism with deep emotional expression. My aesthetic favors suggestion over explicit detail, creating compositions that invite interpretation and evoke quiet yet powerful emotions. Working primarily with watercolors and acrylics, I explore fluidity and texture, crafting art pieces that approach themes of identity, femininity, and personal introspection.
For me, art is a dialogue between the seen and the unseen, a way to convey emotions and stories beyond words. My work balance abstraction and figuration, capturing human emotion with subtlety and depth. For this exhibition, I pushed myself out of the comfort zone and I created a piece digitally, inspired by the exhibition theme.
https://www.instagram.com/anuska_simple_art
Suvi Venhe
Suvi Venhe (b. 1995) is a visual artist from Turku who works independently in Helsinki. Her works feature a lot of complementary colors, reflecting for her the contrast between the environment she grew up in and her current surroundings. Her art includes many abstract forms, through which she seeks to let go of the pursuit of a perfect and straightforwardly clear outcome.
https://www.instagram.com/suviveneh
Pipsa Brück
Pipsa Brück is a Swiss-Finnish multifaceted visual artist from Helsinki. Brücks work is based on research and analysis; Her current work examines societal hierarchies and the relationships between people, materialism and overconsumption.
Brück’s work is inspired by everyday urban life and the artist's own relationship with nature. In her works, Brück emphasizes the beauty of overprocessed materials with oil paints, and also utilises recycled and discarded materials as a link to overconsumption, to emphasise it’s presence in urban everyday life.
https://www.instagram.com/bruckpipsa
Ximena Gamboa
Ximena Gamboa is a Mexican painter and visual artist. Based in Helsinki since 2023, her work revolves around exploring the random as the force that drives the expansion of the universe. The visuals in her art are inspired by patterns found in nature, representing the pass of time, such as smoke dissipating into thin air, snowflakes swirling around the atmosphere or intricate arrangements of pebbles in rivers’ sediments. In her meticulous weaving of colour, she studies the entropy of color itself. In her work, color represents the subconscious mind, a force of its own kind.
https://www.instagram.com/xumana_
Mayah Holmberg
Mayah Holmberg is a Helsinki-based interdisciplinary artist. Born in Finland and raised in both Finland and Nicaragua, her work often explores societal themes through a dual cultural lens. She currently works with visual art, movement, and text.
Recurring themes in her work include questions of knowledge, memory, and the tangible comprehension of subject, object, and power. Currently, she is particularly interested in narratives, dialogues, and discourses, exploring these communicative concepts through various mediums.
https://www.instagram.com/mayahholmberg/
Inkeri Rantala
Inkeri Rantala is an artist and feminist from Turku who primarily works with painting, using materials such as acrylic and oil paints, dry and oil pastels, spray paint, ink, as well as various films and foils.
Rantala creates socially critical feminist portraits of women as a cohesive body of work, which she calls "muijat" (a colloquial Finnish term for women). In addition to these "muija" paintings, she also creates various still-life paintings that explore "the world of muijat" from a different perspective. The themes of both the "muija" and still-life paintings address girlhood and the stereotypes and norms associated with it in a socially critical, playful, and emancipatory manner.
https://www.instagram.com/inkeri_artist/
Ksenia Voy Kheninen
Ksenia Voy Kheninen is a multidisciplinary artist based in Helsinki. Her sculptures weave together materials such as ceramics, textiles, found objects, paint, embroidery, metal, glass, and text. They are *mind ikebanas*, assemblages of emotional and societal debris, memories, and fragments of deconstructed selves. Her work reflects on the fractured nature of contemporary identity, examining how we are shaped by the metrics of privilege and exclusivity. These metrics include badges of belonging or displacement, dictated by neurotypical societal structures, market values, and western ideals.
Through lived experience Voy Kheninen deals with the themes of immigration, neurodiversity and queerness. Through her sculptures, she externalizes the fragmented inner worlds of the other, creating tangible expressions of a different mindspace. Her work calls for a normalization of otherness—not as a token, but as an integral and unremarkable part of shared spaces.
https://www.instagram.com/ksenia_voy_art/
Eliisa Loukola
Eliisa Loukola (b. 1997, Finland) investigates traces, (dis)appearances and embodied memories. She relies on writing as methodology and discusses authorship through dealing with found objects as archives of memory in themselves. Through the investigation and reconsideration of traces she aims to create a language of acts, one where collecting as well as portrait-painting gain the function of sentences through repetition. She is currently based in Helsinki, Finland and holds a Masters in Fine Art from MAFA, HKU.
https://www.instagram.com/eliisa.loukola/#
Elina Kervinen
Elina is a Helsinki-based artist and art educator, who explores feminist themes by sculpting and photographing. She is interested in memories and observations about her own experiences and surrounding society.
“In the series of two photographs ‘Kenen ärräkahvi’ (Finnish spoken language meaning ‘Whose R-kiosk coffee’) I was interested in traces and assumptions. What kind of people are we used to seeing wearing lipstick? Why do you wear a suit on the seventh floor, but a hoodie on the fifth? How deeply rooted stereotypes about gender, sexuality and socioeconomic backgrounds are and how the mind draws a picture of a person before seeing them?
I challenge myself and everyone else to question even the smallest assumptions and reflect where it comes from. There is always space for growth and learning.”
https://www.instagram.com/elluy_