Image: Erich Berger, Spectral Landscape, Kovela, 2024
Oulu Art Museum opens Sopeutuminen (Adaptation) on 16 October 2026, an exhibition curated and produced by Photo North – Northern Photographic Centre that runs until 14 February 2027. The show is part of the cultural programme of Oulu2026, the city’s year as European Capital of Culture.
Adaptation has long been understood as biological or cultural adjustment to changing conditions, or as a way of getting through hardship. The exhibition asks what it might mean instead of submission, proposing that adaptation could be a form of wild rebellion. In this framing it becomes active agency, questioning familiar stories that tell people to cope and accept their fate, and asking who or what should adapt, people or nature, and who sets the terms.
Eight artists take part: Matti Aikio, Erich Berger, Michèle Boulogne, Elina Bry, Jaakko Myyri, Arttu Nieminen, Hans Pieski and Maija Tammi. Several developed work through Sopeutuminen residencies in northern Finland. In Sodankylä, for example, Boulogne used a dipole antenna to capture radio signals from the NOAA-19 weather satellite as it passed overhead.
The curatorial team is led by chief curator Antti Tenetz with curators Taija Jyrkäs and Darja Zaitsev of Photo North – Northern Photography Centre. The exhibition was realised in collaboration with the University of Oulu’s Oulanka Research Station and Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, KulttuuriKauppila in Ii, Project Atol, Street Level Photoworks and Oulu Art Museum, and continues the Creative Europe-funded More-than-Planet project.
The opening weekend includes a panel on 17 October, held in English, in which Boulogne, Myyri and Bry discuss their works and residencies with Tenetz, followed the same afternoon by a presentation of SPEKTR Z: SAPLAB, a mobile art-and-science laboratory for observing the environment. The exhibition opens to the public with a free event on the evening of Friday 16 October, and on Sunday 18 October the three curators lead a tour of the works in Finnish.
