Wet Archives

Wet  

as in bodily fluids, sexual secretions, sweat that drips down your back when sitting in the archives, reading about your ancestors, at some point the sweat turns into tears  

as in how fragile Western, paper-based documents are, how easily they could be turned into moist, unreadable mush, destroying the violent structures they hold up  

as in the histories that the land holds, rivers and landmarks, cities and streets as our archives, redefining and expanding the term, seeing the histories and stories that are hidden in plain sight  

          as a force of change.  

The exhibition delves into archives, striving to break free from the Western definition of archiving, which carries with it the specters of oppression, research, exoticization, and violence. History lives everywhere, and archives spread to everything we leave our marks in.  

Carmen Baltzar participates in the exhibition with her work weight, exploring the weight of time in the form of a calendar. Shia Conlon delves into personal and community archiving with two collage works, Fossil I and Fossil II, and a text-based work, Contact Sheet, using material from his own collections and his findings – and a lack thereof – in the New York queer and trans archives. Lotta Hagelin reflects on how museums and art institutions visually present Sámi people in the photo series Museum Property. In the work Min Olbmot, Hagelin and Ritni Ráste Pieski explore Sámi storytelling traditions through drag characters. The exhibition curator Aarni Pieski’s essay ties together the themes of the exhibition and deepens the reflection on archives.

The exhibition has been supported by the Uusimaa Fund of the Arts Promotion Center and The Finnish Heritage Agency.

The exhibition is part of the museum gallery’s 2025-26 program called Textures of Security, which has been curated through an open call by the museum’s curatorial team and invited curator Farbod Fakharzadeh, and supported by Museovirasto.