Musicians play Jani Ruscica's cartoon-derived instruments in 'Flatlands' at Kiasma this autumn

Jani Ruscica's installation "Flatlands" (2018) is being brought to life again this autumn at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, where three musicians will perform with it inside the collection exhibition "A Dream in Four Colours." The sessions take place on October 9, October 20 and November 6, 2026, each lasting about 45 minutes.

The work starts from musical instruments that Ruscica found in old cartoons and animations. In those drawings, according to the museum, the instruments expressed either the values of their era or resistance to them. Rebuilt from the images, the objects are fully playable. The materials listed for the piece include bamboo, wood, brass, plexiglas and glass, along with a clavichord sound box, a ratchet, a cowbell, a kettledrum, a post horn, a sledgehammer and jingle bells. Ruscica has written that instruments taken from mere depictions must find a new relationship with the world as physical things that also have a voice.

Miio Holopainen performs on Friday, October 9, Sara Majidi Nejad on Tuesday, October 20, and Natalia Castrillón on Friday, November 6. Castrillón already activated the work in April. The musicians play and interpret the objects and their particular materials.

"A Dream in Four Colours" occupies Kiasma's second and third floors and is drawn from the Finnish National Gallery's collection of around 43,000 works. Rather than following a single theme, it asks visitors to approach the art intuitively, as one might take in a dream. It brings together work by 49 artists, many of them not shown at Kiasma for many years. The exhibition is curated by Satu Oksanen with Saara Hacklin and Saara Karhunen, and the related Kiasma Theatre programme is curated by Jonna Strandberg. A second performance work in the show, by Ville Laurinkoski, draws on Guy Hocquenghem's novel "La colère de l'Agneau." A catalogue accompanies the exhibition, which remains open until January 10, 2027.