Elina Ruohonen: Reset

Personal life, social reality, and visions and utopias of the future provide the starting points for Elina Ruohonen’s practice. Ecological themes have been close to Ruohonen since the 2010s, as she has sought answers to how humans and other living beings coexist and act together. Her recent body of work has focused on imagining an alternative future as a mutable and open space, where order is in constant motion and power relations are negotiable.

Reset presents paintings completed during 2025–2026 and invites the viewer to step into a reality where the Arctic meets the tropics, the exotic the familiar, and paradise dystopia. The exhibition examines the forms, fusions, and networks of living beings, as well as a possible future in which the boundary between humans and the rest of nature becomes blurred. In this new world order, interspecies power relations have shifted, and the survivors live side by side.

Ruohonen is known for her reverse technique, which she uses when painting with oil on the back surface of transparent plexiglass. What is painted first becomes the final, topmost layer of the work, while the last layer of paint forms its background. The glossy front surface of the plexiglass reflects the surrounding space and the viewer as part of the painting, transforming the act of looking into a tangible form of participation. The painting is not merely a depicted world, but a space in which a new world is constructed through our gaze. Ruohonen’s strong brushstrokes guide the eye from one detail to another, portraying animal-like and human-like beings adapted to a new, self-determined reality. Where do they begin, where do they end? Who is looking, and at whom? Reset suggests that redefinition does not take place only in an imagined future, but here and now—in the way we look, encounter, and reimagine planetary space.

Elina Ruohonen (b. 1970) is a multidisciplinary visual artist who lives and works in Turku. She studied at the Kankaanpää Art School, the Krasnoyarsk Institute of Arts in Siberia, and Tampere University of Applied Sciences. Ruohonen has actively exhibited since the 1990s, and her works are included in numerous public and private collections. In addition to her own artistic practice, she is also a member of the Seasisters artist collective, which researches the archipelago ecosystem.

The exhibition is supported by the Finnish Heritage Agency.