Piia Oksanen

Piia Oksanen works as a curator of exhibitions at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. Currently, her practice is closely tied to the institutional framework of an art museum which functions both as an archive, speaks in the present tense, and serves as a public institution oriented toward the future, and where the curatorial work is always entangled with hosting collaborators, artists, audiences, and managing various processes. Her work focuses on temporary exhibitions and her curatorial attention centers on the exhibition as an embodied and spatial practice and encounter. For her, curating involves working with the space as one central agent from which the conceptual thinking around the display/enactment of artworks begins. Thinking about what can take place when the audience steps in guides her practice in many ways. Recent collaborations in Kiasma with artists such as Nina Beier, Monira Al Qadiri, Dafna Maimon and Essi Kuokkanen have opened up possibilities for fostering artist collaboration and reflecting on how solo exhibitions survey artistic practices. She is particularly interested in fragmented and non-narrative approaches to exhibition curating. Repetition and loop, boredom and fatigue, and leakages have recently been at the center of her attention: they can concern content, medium, artistic practice and exhibition alike. Her writing is closely woven into the momentum of exhibition making and its reflection. Recent publications include essays ‘Grounded Sculptures. On Display and on Curating Nina Beier’s Survey Exhibition at Kiasma’ and ‘An Organism Called a Museum Exhibition. A Curatorial Essay on Dafna Maimon’s Solo Show’.

Most recent extensive work includes, for example, co-curating ARS22 and the aforementioned solo shows. Previous positions include, among others, Galerie Anhava and Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art. Oksanen holds MA from Art History from the University of Helsinki and MA from curatorial studies from Aalto University. She is based in Helsinki.