Tianjun Li
BIRD COLLISIONS
In Tianjun Li’s solo exhibition Bird Collisions at Forum Box, they employ the bird as a cross-cultural symbol to map the entanglement of ecology and migration.
Bird Collisions extends from the long-term project Free as Birds. Over the past two years, Li has moved akin to a migratory bird, exploring islands across borders to examine how birds function as a cross-cultural emblem of “freedom”. Within this project, visual elements and vocal experiments intertwine. Through photography, video installations, and vocal performance, Li develops a new decoded “bird language”, collaborating with local communities to create birdsong choirs and a collective imagination of “becoming a bird.”
The new exhibition takes the ecological phenomenon of birds striking architectural glass as a point of departure to question transparency. The natural instinct of avian migration collides with the invisible architecture of social structures – a tension that mirrors the seemingly transparent yet rigid barriers confronted by human migrants within systemic frameworks. Li reconfigures the gallery into a sensory site. Through vocal mimicry; collective and individual chanting, collaborative storytelling, alongside bodily presence, sound, video installations, and experimental photography, the exhibition constructs a space that is both poetic and poignant.
Tianjun Li and Bird Collisions is supported by the Saastamoinen Foundation, B28 Residency by Nordic Culture Point, Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike), and Aalto Studios and Genelec.
Special thanks to the participants in the work: Ida Vu, Ricardo Baltazar, Branislav Dakovic, Safa Solati, and Tangmo Ladapha.
Tianjun Li (Timjune, CN/FI) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Finland whose practice integrates lens-based media, experimental vocal performance, and spatial installation. Through synesthetic translation and a four-octave vocal range, they process the correspondences between human and non-human entities into a visual and sonic cross-species storytelling system.
Li holds an MA in Visual Cultures, Curating, and Contemporary Art, with a minor in Sound in New Media, from Aalto University. Their work has been supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Saastamoinen Foundation, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Finnish Cultural Foundation, and the Espoo City Artist Grant. Residencies include Saari Residence (Kone Foundation) and B28 Residency (Nordic Culture Point). Their work has been presented internationally in exhibitions, performances, and installations. A new solo institutional commission at Fruitmarket Gallery (UK), supported by the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland, is scheduled to open in late 2026.
timjune.com
@timjunelee
Pavel Rotts
MATTER OF TOUCH
Matter of Touch continues Pavel Rotts’ research on materiality of memory through a medium of clay. It serves as a continuation of Climbing a memory installation on view at the facade of Forum Box.
Several historical brick buildings in Helsinki, including Paavalinkirkko and the former Sinebrychoff brewery, still preserve traces of wartime bombings. Using casts taken from these damaged walls, Rotts transfers their forms into hand-made clay bricks produced throughout the exhibition.
Brick is one of the most elementary units of construction, but also a carrier of memory. Each brick is individually shaped by hand and bears the imprint of a trace left by wartime bombing, pressed into the clay while it is still soft. Throughout the exhibition, the artist gradually builds a wall from handmade bricks, eventually enclosing himself within the structure in a long durational performance.
Alongside the construction of the wall, visitors are invited to participate in brick-making workshops. Participants can produce their own clay bricks and leave personal imprints on their surfaces using objects they bring with them.
The exhibition is kindly supported by the Kone Foundation and Oskar Öflunds Stiftelse.
Producer: Jaana Denisova-Laulajainen
Technical assistance: Andreas Behn-Eschenburg
Exhibition partners: Wienerberger Oy, Material shop, Composite EE
Pavel Rotts (b. 1982, Petroskoi) is an Ingrian multidisciplinary artist based in Helsinki since 2015. His practice spans installation, performance, moving image, sound, and artistic research, engaging with histories of displacement, political violence, collective memory, and his own identity. Rotts holds an MFA from the University of the Arts Helsinki, presents work internationally, and is part of the artist duo SAHSAPASHA. He is also active in artist-led cultural initiatives and anti-war activism.
His work has been shown in solo exhibitions such as Climbing a Memory (Narva Museum, 2024) and Leave No Trace (Helsinki, 2021), and as part of SAHSAPASHA in venues across Europe, including the New Institute (Rotterdam, Netherlands) and Paradise Works (Manchester, UK). Rotts has participated in numerous group exhibitions and residencies throughout Finland and Europe, including the Joensuu Biennale MITÄ, Mänttä Art Festival (Finland), Narva Art Residency (Estonia), Pikene på Broen (Norway), and The Mirror Institution (Sweden). He has received multiple grants and awards, including the Finnish Cultural Foundation Artist Grant (2024), the William Thuring Award (2025), and project grants from the KONE Foundation and Oskar Öflund Foundation. Alongside his artistic practice, Pavel co-founded the anti-war initiative NO PUTIN NO, the KINO Club Helsinki, and the Shelter Festival.
Yujie Zhou
HEALTH HAMMER
Tools of protest serve a purpose when crafting a movement. Meanwhile, objects of monument are crafted for remembering, for reminding, and for tending the wounded collective once a movement’s pace halts. In this exhibition, Health Hammer raises a portable monument; an object that documents fragments of events, struggles, and acts of resistance that otherwise cannot be publicly pronounced, mourned, or commemorated.
The physical health hammer, the ideal portable monument suggested in the exhibition, looks like a self-defense weapon but functions as a tool of self-care. Derived from ordinary life, the health hammer is a manual tool that combines acupressure tapping with herbal aromatherapy to relieve muscle tension and stimulate lymphatic drainage. The hammers encourage a moment for collective healing from the trauma of being concealed, censored, or erased, through the self-performed gesture of massage. One pounds their own body–or another body–with the health hammer until it vibrates, echoes, and reaches resonance with the past, present, and future.
The fabric wrapping the hammers consists of cut-outs from pieces of larger handwoven Jacquard textiles. While the larger pieces render coded graphics of resistance in action, the cut-out, which becomes a decorative and functional component of a health hammer, traces the fragments of poems, phrases, words, and letters that resisted against the institutional systems of forgetting. Interwoven and inherited, the textiles in the exhibition accompany one another as they resonate through their shared encoded memories.
The installation of exhibition space draws from the structure of the Chinese draw loom, the precursor to the Jacquard loom. Historically, the draw loom was organized in two layers: the draw-boy sat above, controlling the pattern, while the weaver below carried out the physical labor of weaving. This binary system of weaving would later contribute to the development of the Jacquard mechanism and, ultimately, modern computational systems, where languages continue to process through encoding and decoding.
The exhibition treats weaving as an act to reminisce the presence of the voices silenced loud under the authoritarian censorship and utilizes objects of monuments to preserve the censored information in functional form. The Jacquard weave materializes the erasable content into tangible, long-lasting representation, allowing the continuation of its impact and legacy of documenting the truth. Sincerely, the exhibition wishes to offer the ones who fought with portable monuments that serves as personal remembrance of disobedience and encourages moments of self-regulation and care.
The exhibition is curated by Chih-Tung Lin.
Yujie Zhou’s work and the exhibition are supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
Yujie Zhou (they/them) is a Chinese visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland. They navigate a decoded notion of language and methods of bypassing censorship through photography, Jacquard weaving, video, and publishing. Drawing from the juxtaposition between their nationalist upbringing and socio-political forms of control, their practice interrogates the construction of historical narratives while reframing collective individuality.
Zhou holds a Master’s degree in Arts from Aalto University, Finland, majoring in Photography with a minor in Textiles. Their work has been presented at the Finnish Museum of Photography (Helsinki, Finland); alpha nova & galerie futura (Berlin, Germany); Copenhagen International Photography Festival 2025; the Singapore International Photography Festival 2024; and Plat(t)form 2023 at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. Zhou has been granted residencies at Kone Foundation’s Saari Residence (Finland), HIAP (Helsinki, Finland), Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (Dublin, Ireland), Pioneer Works (New York, USA), Künstlerdorf Schöppingen (Germany), and Treasure Hill Artist Village (Taipei, Taiwan).
Chih-Tung Lin (they/them) is a curator and artist based in Helsinki, Finland, originally from Taiwan. Lin approaches their work through an interdisciplinary lens. Their practice embraces playfulness and fluidity, often blurring the lines between curating and art-making. They explore topics through a range of methods—curation, performance, exhibition-making, and publishing—intentionally avoiding confinement to a single medium. Central to their work are narratives around social relations and societal roles, often filtered through a psychological perspective. They have curated exhibitions in Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Taiwan, and their works have been shown in Finland and Estonia. They worked as a co-artistic director at Catalysti ry, a non-profit support art organization dedicated to transcultural art workers in Finland. They hold a MFA in Praxis Exhibition Studies Programme at University of the Arts Helsinki and a BSc in Psychology at National Chengchi University.
Mediabox