Laulu Tulipunaisesta Kukasta

Sasha Rotts approaches painting obliquely - through textile, through touch, through the residue of wear. A graduate of the painting department, she replaces pigment with fabric, developing what she terms textile painting. Striped trousers - marked by use, by class, by memory - are disassembled and reconfigured into ornamental fields, where floral rhythms emerge from the logic of repetition and seam. Here, the visual language of post-Soviet street culture brushes against the decorative ethos of Art Nouveau, recalling the utopian ornament of William Morris, yet grounded in a distinctly contemporary materiality.

Her practice unfolds in dialogue with Mikhail Bakhtin and his notion of the carnivalesque. Laughter, in this framework, is neither incidental nor purely comic - it is a force of inversion. It suspends order, dissolves hierarchy, and renders the fixed unstable. The high descends; the low rises. Meaning becomes porous. What emerges is not satire, but a collective, ambivalent laughter directed at the world in its entirety.

Scale becomes a strategy of estrangement. Familiar garments are enlarged beyond human proportion, reimagined as attire for a figure that exceeds the body - a giant, or perhaps a memory of one, drawn from the illogical space of the fairy tale. This absent presence haunts the exhibition: a wearer implied but never seen, a body both imagined and invited. The suit awaits its subject.

Color operates as both structure and disruption. Unexpected chromatic encounters - acidic greens, saturated reds, improbable juxtapositions - converge with images that oscillate between the sacred and the absurd: a rocket-church, a serpent, an oversized bloom. These elements do not resolve into narrative; instead, they open a field of possibility. Rotts proposes imagination not as escape, but as a generative condition - one in which laughter becomes a threshold, and through which new forms, however unstable, might come into being. Exhibition supported by Kone Foundation and Museovirasto