23.5. - 14.6.2026 half life, over time - Art School Maa’s third-year students Graduation Exhibition

(Vernissage 22.5)

When recalling an experience, you actually remember the last time you were thinking about it. The original event is already gone and fades over time. The half-life of fluorine-20 is only 11 seconds, while uranium-235 takes 700 million years. How long is the half-life of the past?

The decay process of the past shapes the meanings of the present. What disappears, what remains? What do the traces look like? The tension between disappearance and preservation sets the tone of our time: it is easy for an individual to vanish, even though today everything leaves a digital trace and the lifespan of disposable materials surpasses our own. Histories that stretch across generations are printed over and over on ghostly paper without anyone remembering by whom.

This place is no longer the same, one of us changed. This can happen in the long run, but where are we running? Sometimes it’s impossible to keep up and you realize you have lost the current moment. The return to the present is the scariest return; what if everything is different from when I left; what if nothing has changed while I was gone. Even though the mind can be elsewhere, the body is always there. Within us we carry all that has been stored in our body – remembrance is a site-specific process.

half life, over time is the final exhibition of Art School Maa’s third year students, where 14 artists explore decay, formation, and traces left by time. The exhibition makes visible the ways in which the past, the present and the future haunt us and our surrounding structures. It is a collection of decelerations where the artists, each through their own practice, pause to examine the meanings absorbed into experience, peeling back its layers.

Being present and observing the world carefully (through the means of art or otherwise) seems more timely now than ever. We live in a fast-paced time where the experience of reality gets scattered by an overload of information, uncertainty, and lack of community. We are persistently only partially present, the other half is already elsewhere. half life, over time invites the audience to share time and space in Levyhalli, where different rhythms and layers of time encounter.

In this final exhibition a wide variety of materials is presented with diverse forms of contemporary art. The artists are exploring the themes through moving image, installation, sound, painting and performance in an exhibition that is open in Suomenlinna Levyhalli from 23rd of May until 14th of June 2026.  

the artists in the exhibition

Aino Kuusisto 

   Anna Hallikainen 

  Antti Heiskala 

       Emilia Värelä 

                 Hussein Barbar

            Lassi Tihkumetsä

Lucas Toljamo

      Nooa Paukkunen 

               Sara Tammi

                    Sofia Sylvia

                        Tuulikki Toppari

          Verna Toivonen

Vilma Tietäväinen 

IMAGE: Emilia Värelä