EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art will reopen its Saastamoinen Foundation collection presentation in October 2026 with ‘Alien in Me’, a fully renewed exhibition curated by EMMA director Krist Gruijthuijsen. The exhibition will open on 23 October on the museum’s second floor in Espoo, Finland, and will bring together works by approximately 50 artists.
The new presentation marks 20 years of collaboration between EMMA and the Saastamoinen Foundation, the museum’s founding partner. It will occupy the entire collection gallery and considers how humans and other species might coexist, develop and form connections in a reality that is continually changing.
The participating artists listed by EMMA include Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Ana Lupaș, Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Heli Rekula, P. Staff, Jenna Sutela and Gillian Wearing. The exhibition’s title and framing point toward questions of otherness, embodiment and relations between human and non-human life, although the museum’s announcement does not assign individual works to specific themes or sections.
‘Alien in Me’ replaces ‘Dialogeja’, the current Saastamoinen Foundation collection exhibition, which will close in stages during August and September to allow for the exchange of works. ‘Dialogeja’ was organised around pairs and groups of works placed in open dialogue, with an emphasis on recent acquisitions and changing relationships between artworks. Its presentation also included a media room for newer media-art acquisitions.
The Saastamoinen Foundation’s collection is described by EMMA as one of Finland’s significant collections of Finnish and international art. It began with a home collection assembled by a Kuopio industrial family in the 1910s. The foundation was established in 1968 to advance society through art and science, and has continued to support the acquisition, preservation and presentation of artworks. The collection is owned by the Saastamoinen Family Foundation and is housed at EMMA; it now contains more than 3,000 works.
EMMA is based at the WeeGee Exhibition Centre in Tapiola, Espoo, and focuses its exhibition and collection activities on Finnish and international modernism, contemporary art and design. Admission to ‘Alien in Me’ is listed at €20 for visitors over 29, €10 for discount groups, and free for visitors under 18 and Museum Card holders. The exhibition is scheduled to open on 23 October 2026.
