Jaana Laakkonen

Jaana Laakkonen (b.1985) is Finnish visual artist, currently living and working in Amsterdam. She finished her BA at Tampere University of Applied Sciences in 2010 and she has MFA from Academy of Fine Arts of University of Arts Helsinki (2014). She have exhibited her work actively since 2010, among others in solo exhibition at Forum Box and in group show at Helsinki Contemporary in 2013. Her latest solo exhibition Event Handlers took place in Space for Free Arts Helsinki in October 2014. She is currently working with Dublin based artist Barbara Knezevic for an exhibition that takes place at HIAP in April 2016. Before her residency period in Kulturbunker she works in artist residency Treignac Projet, France.

Her most recent practice is affected by recent realist philosophies, eco-feminist and post-humanist thinking, which all share starting point in challenging dichotomies of Western modernity derived from nature-culture dualism. Her work explores what could it mean to work through that kind of world view (instead of taking it as a topic or subject for work)? Could that lead on paintings and exhibitions which challenge and rework boundaries and make space for other kinds of ways to think and act?

In Kulturbunker, Laakkonen continues working on the central questions of her practice, such as: could paintings and exhibitions done from different position or worldview ask or insist to become confronted through different questions?

Jaana Laakkonen’s residency takes place at Culture Department of the City of Frankfurt am Main as part of the international residency exchange programme.