Skeleton (Utopias Lahti 2026)

Skeleton brings together works by six international artists in a former service station currently in temporary disuse. Originally opened in 1961 by the finnish Esso-chain, the building has undergone several commercial and architectural transformations: its modernist glass façade was covered in the 1980s–90s with postmodern concrete and tiled surfaces. After more than fifty years in operation, it lost its environmental permit for fuel sales and, in 2010, was converted into a well-known music club. At the same time, a glass pavilion was constructed around the former canopy—an addition that now anchors the exhibition.

The artists in the exhibition approach photography as a spatial, architectural and urban medium. In the space of a city, images are embedded in structures, materials, and social functions. Photographs both align with and challenge our everyday environments. Across the exhibition, the works situate themselves within these multisensory processes and engage directly with the scale, texture, and physical conditions of the site. Two artists have also worked in the building for two months prior to the exhibition, allowing its architecture to guide their projects.

The building itself has long mediated images for commercial persuasion—fragmenting, stretching, and reconfiguring them across its surfaces. In Victoria Pidust’s works, photographic fragments of urban environments extend into the building’s architecture, aligning with its textures and proportions. Ida Tomminen’s sculptural image-objects focus on circulation: how images produced and distributed at scale become part of our everyday visual backdrop. Gundega Strauberga works with paper photographs collected in Lahti, reorganising them into new constellations and constructing alternative contexts together with local residents.

Photography here also becomes a tool for examining space and its social conditions. The built environment is shaped by ongoing cycles of decay, demolition, and reconstruction. In Paul Kuimet’s installation, the dismantling of a modernist glass façade appears both as a utopian and dystopian vision of the bureaucratic financial systems that sustain it. Hicham Benohoud stages similar ruptures in living spaces, producing uncanny images that expose our emotional ties to domestic environments. Over the two months leading up to the exhibition, Leonardo Taddei has used the glass pavilion as a site for collaborative image-making and play. In his work with local participants, found and borrowed objects are used to reconfigure everyday situations.

Utopias Lahti is an artist-run visual arts festival organised in Lahti, Finland. The third edition of the festival takes place in May 2026.