Welcome to the opening of the exhibition on Thursday 9.4. 17:00-20:00!

Dates: 10.4.-26.4.
Opening hours: Wednesday – Sunday, 12:00 – 18:00 (closed Mon-Tue)
Location: HIAP Gallery Augusta, Suomenlinna (Building nr. 33 on Suomenlinna map)

Event: 18.4 Silent Sauna and Reading session with Katya Lesiv. More information coming soon

Each winter, I think: it’s impossible that the trees will bear leaves, flowers, fruit. Fruit is fantasy, utopia, impossibility. For half of the year, bare sticks stand in the cold. You cannot surprise me; I know spring will come. Yet still, how unexpected that it arrives. Where is the place of memory that survives winter, that laughs at death? I am the place of memory — of safety, of sun, of pleasure. I am intention’s moving object. The intention  to return to such a place, again and again.

Katya Lesiv’s exhibition is rooted in sensory memory, myth, and the maternal body. The body becomes a vessel of intention — guided by it, to reach back to the pleasure of the childhood ritual of eating mulberries straight from the tree. In a time marked by instability and fragility, the work unfolds as a quiet yet resilient gesture of presence. The exhibition gathers around the triad milky / bloody / muddy — echoing the taste and stain of mulberries while tracing a layered language of fertility, motherhood, loss, and the cycle of life.

Bringing together performative photography, text, and sculptural objects, the exhibition moves between instruction, spell, and poem. Self-portraits capture moments of eating berries, belly massage on self and child. The silver gelatin prints appear as objects, referencing the body within the image and gaining a bodily presence themselves. Site-specific installations, accompanied by wood-carved and copper elements, stand as quiet monuments to presence and intention. 

Katya Lesiv (b. 1993, Ukraine) is a visual artist and photographer currently based in Finland. Her practice explores themes of cyclicality, physicality, emotional experience, and motherhood through photography, artist books, installation, text, and moving image. Often rooted in routine rituals, her performative approach seeks to preserve intimacy while creating spaces of shared presence. Books play a central role in her work, frequently becoming the final form of her projects.

Lesiv’s works have been presented in solo exhibitions in Ukraine, Finland, and the Netherlands, as well as in international group exhibitions. Her photobook Lullaby 1 was included in the top 100 photobooks of How We See: Photobooks by Women (10×10 Photobooks), and her book I love you was shortlisted for the Aperture PhotoBook Awards in 2022.

The exhibition is supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike), Goethe-Institut Finnland, and the Ukraine Solidarity Residencies Programme.

The Ukraine Solidarity Residency Programme Exhibition Series is curated by Dana Neilson