Ars Fennica 2027 Nominees Announced

The €50,000 Ars Fennica Award is Finland’s most prestigious contemporary art prize. Presented every two years by the Niemistö Art Foundation Ars Fennica, the award recognises artistic excellence and a distinctive creative vision.

The award panel appointed by the foundation has selected the four shortlisted artists and appointed the international art expert who will choose the winner. This year, the winner will be selected by curator, writer and cultural strategist Fatoş Üstek.

A joint exhibition of the nominees’ work will be curated by Kiasma curator Anna Mustonen and presented at Kiasma from October 15, 2027 to March 26, 2028. The winner will be announced in February 2028. Following its presentation at Kiasma, the exhibition will travel to Kunstsilo in Kristiansand, Norway.

The award panel responsible for selecting the nominees and international expert is chaired by Leena Niemistö, MD. The other members are Museum Director Kiira Miesmaa (Kiasma), Museum Director Arja Miller (HAM Helsinki Art Museum), art critic Sanna Lipponen, and Head of Collections Else-Brit Kroneberg (Kunstsilo, Norway).

The Ars Fennica Award is being presented for the 29th time. Previous nominees have included artists from Finland, the Nordic and Baltic countries, and the St Petersburg region. Exhibitions featuring Ars Fennica nominees have previously been held at Kiasma on six occasions, in 2007, 2009, 2010, 2014, 2017 and 2023.

The Niemistö Art Foundation Ars Fennica

The Niemistö Art Foundation Ars Fennica was established in 1990 to spark interest in the arts by creating new international connections for Finnish art, supporting artists in their creative work, and fostering a wider public appreciation of art.

Introductions to the nominees and international expert

About Anna Camner

Anna Camner’s painting moves in the borderline between surrealism and natural scientific observation. With a technically precise and slow process, often on small panels or acrylic glass, she creates images that require close observation. Her motives appear as microscopic cross-sections of a larger, unknown whole: organic structures, membranes, porous tissues, plant cell-like forms, eyes, gloves and bodily fragments. The colour palette is dominated by powdery shades of pink, iceblue and white. 

”Painting lets me observe and invent. I work as if depicting a species from elsewhere, not yet named, where bodies, plants and materials form one another, becoming stranger the closer I look.” 
– Anna Camner

Anna Camner (b. 1977, Sweden) lives and works in Stockholm. Since graduating from the Royal Institute of Art (Stockholm) in 2003, her work has been exhibited extensively in solo shows in Stockholm, London, and New York, along with group exhibitions in the International Biennial of Contemporary Art (BIACI) in Cartagena and Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (Hiroshima, Japan). She was awarded the Beckers Art Award in 2017. Her artworks are included in collections such as Magasin III Museum & Foundation for Contemporary Art, Malmö Art Museum, Wanås Konst, Public Art Agency Sweden and UBS Art Collection.

About Anna Estarriola

Anna Estarriola combines sculptural installations with moving image, sound, and technology through a performative approach. She frequently integrates embodiment as both subject and object, using it as a lens through which to examine perception, and communication. Her work draws influence from different forms of science, epistemologies, and systems of belief. Beneath lies a persistent curiosity about how isolated and collective behaviours shape different nested and shared realities. Her work unfolds as shifting environments where scales, perspectives and power structures are in contrast and coexistence.

”I am interested in the instability of certainties and presences, in unknowns that recur and morph across time, and in the speculative staging of hypotheses about how things are, relate or could be.” 
– Anna Estarriola

Estarriola (b. 1980, Catalonia) lives and works in Helsinki. She holds a BA from the University of Barcelona (2004) and an MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki (2009), and has also studied contemporary dance. Her work has been presented in Finland and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Amos Rex, the Serlachius Museums, Pori Art Museum and Galerie Anhava, among others. Her works have also been shown in venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Tallinn City Gallery, Max Estrella in Madrid and Borås Art Museum in Sweden. In 2015 she received the AVEK Award for media art, and in 2023 the designated William Thuring Prize. Her works are in major public and private collections such as the Finnish National Gallery, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Pori Art Museum, HAM Helsinki Art Museum and the Saastamoinen Foundation.

About Sandra Mujinga

Sandra Mujinga is a Norwegian-Congolese artist and musician based in Oslo. Working across installation, sculpture, performance, text, and digital media, she explores shifting economies of visibility and opacity, self-representation, and the politics of surveillance. Her work is deeply invested in traces and concealment, what lingers, haunts, or slips away, and in how bodies are remembered. She often speculates on creatures from both the past, drawing from fossils, and the future, conjuring ghostly figures that resist fixed identities. Informed by the histories and legacies of colonialism, science fiction, Afrofuturism, and post-human theory, Mujinga explores questions of humanness, visibility, and belonging, envisioning alternative worlds where technology, humans, and nonhumans merge in speculative and political acts of becoming.

"Inspired by ecologies that decenter the human, my world-building practice questions what it means to be visible when visibility no longer guarantees safety. Historically and politically, I view humanity not as a fixed state, but as a shifting border dictating who deserves care." 
– Sandra Mujinga

Sandra Mujinga (b. 1989, Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo) lives and works in Oslo. She was educated at Malmö Art Academy. She has exhibited internationally at, among others, MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Venice Biennale, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 2021, she was awarded the Preis der Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Her works are included in several international collections and are regularly shown in museums and biennials worldwide.

About Joel Slotte

Joel Slotte’s painting is characterised by a dense, narrative and emotionally loaded world of images, where daily life is pushed towards mythical and dreamlike dimensions. In large figurative oil paintings, as well as in drawings and sculptures, he creates multi-layered scenarios where personal experiences and his own circle of friends are woven together with art-historical references, folklore, popular culture and subcultural expressions, such as metal aesthetics. Slotte often draws inspiration from Finnish settings and visual markers, like forests, fields, cottages and everyday objects. Figures and environments seem familiar at first glance, but the details open up multifaceted meanings.

“I am inspired by things close to me: friendships; moments magically imbued with meaning and emotion on cool and gentle summer nights; sorrows, fractures, shame; seeing the world as art; subcultures; excess; and holy, raucous laughter. Year after year, my mind is preoccupied with similar images, which I paint or draw over and over again, informed by ever-new experiences and questions.”
– Joel Slotte

Joel Slotte (b. 1987, Kokkola, Finland) lives and works in Helsinki. He trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki (2016) and has previously studied at the Nordic Art School in Kokkola (2007 – 2009). He was named Young Artist of the Year in 2021. He has had solo exhibitions at, among others, Turku Art Museum (2024), Galerie Anhava (2024), the gallery of the Finnish Institute in Stockholm (2023) and several other galleries and museums in Finland. His works are included in major art collections such as the Finnish National Gallery, HAM Helsinki Art Museum, Tampere Art Museum, Turku Art Museum, Saastamoinen Foundation, Pro Artibus Foundation as well as the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation.

About the Ars Fennica 2027 art expert Fatoş Üstek

Fatoş Üstek is a curator, writer, and cultural strategist, currently working on establishing a new institution inspired by the concepts outlined in her acclaimed book, The Art Institution of Tomorrow: Reinventing the Model (2024). Formerly the director of two leading UK art institutions, she is the co-founder and Director of FRANK Fair Artist Pay and curator of Frieze Sculpture in London. Üstek serves on various international award juries (including the Art of Progress Award and Art Senses Mentorship Award in 2026, the Scottish Pavilion in 2022, the Netherlands Pavilion in 2022 and 2024 at Venice, and the Turner Prize in 2020), participates on advisory boards (Urbane Künste Ruhr, Istanbul Modern Collection), and nominates for prestigious awards such as the Fourth Plinth and the Jarman Award. She is an active international writer of catalogues, books, and monographs, as well as a lecturer at symposiums, conferences, and higher education programs.

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