Remi Vesala

Remi Vesala is a Helsinki-based curator working across visual art, performance, and film. His practice is informed by perspectives emerging from trans philosophy, as well as by collaborative relationships with artists.

Vesala is the founder of Lou, a curator-run exhibition space on Vaasankatu in Helsinki. Operating on a non-profit basis, Lou hosts exhibitions and performances while remaining inherently transitory in nature. Initially conceived as a temporary curatorial project, it has continued to evolve, taking on different forms of organising and modes of public engagement with varying intensities. Beyond its physical location, Lou has developed into a community of independent curators working closely with contemporary art and performance, committed to fostering open-ended artistic and curatorial practices.

Vesala’s practice unfolds across shifting contexts, from galleries to forests, and from exhibitions to dialogical and research-based processes. For him, trans signifies a way of encountering the world, as well as a mode of interacting with its discursive and material structures. Vesala holds a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from Stockholm University’s Curating Art, Management & Law programme (2019).

my opened shirt blew in the wind – Lou and the pleasure of possibility

This is a story of an independent curator finding themself in the dream-like scenario of having both funding and an exhibition space at once. The curatorial project that emerged, Lou, draws on the philosophies of its predecessors: two artist-run spaces that previously occupied the same location, as well as trans activist Lou Sullivan, who taught us much about the pleasures of self-determination.