HIAP alumni Könül Rafiyeva exhibition curator for Threads of Remembrance in Azerbaijan

HIAP and Helsinki International Curatorial Programme alumni Könül Rafiyeva has curated an exhibition in Baku, Azerbaijan featuring Finland-based artists she met during her residency in June 2025.

Exhibition details:

Threads of Remembrance

Elina Juopperi & Henna Aho

Azerbaijan National Carpet Museum, Baku

17 June – 16 August 2026

Curator: Könül Rafiyeva

How does memory take form?

Threads of Remembrance places the work of Finnish artists Elina Juopperi and Henna Aho inside the Azerbaijan National Carpet Museum, treating the museum not as a repository but as an active textile environment where memory continues to be made and moved. Textile is not a passive medium. It shapes relations. It holds gestures. It remembers.

Rather than presenting textiles as heritage alone, the exhibition approaches them as media of transmission: slow infrastructures through which knowledge, labour, care and relations are carried, stored and reactivated across time. In this sense, curating becomes a textile practice, assembling gestures, materials, archives and fragile continuities into a shared spatial experience.

Elina Juopperi works with translucent silk and traditional raanu, tracing fragile forms of continuity embedded in endangered language, landscape and everyday acts of care. Henna Aho’s sculptural textile structures examine repetition, accumulation and collective making, transforming textile into a spatial field of tension, weight and persistence.

Together, their practices move between disappearance and endurance, intimacy and structure. Textile here functions as interface and protocol: a living system through which bodies, gestures, patterns and traces of labour continue to communicate across time.

Set inside the Azerbaijan National Carpet Museum, the exhibition treats the museum itself as an active archive where memory is continuously made, repaired and shared. Visitors are invited to contribute their own thread to a growing participatory archive.

Organised by Office of the Roving Ambassador of Finland to the South Caucasus, the Azerbaijan National Carpet Museum, with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Azerbaijan.

In partnership with Frame Contemporary Art Finland, HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme and EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art and with support from Finnish Cultural Foundation, Konstföreningen i Åbo – Turun Taideyhdistys ry.