The Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki is showing ‘Our Hearts Can Break Too’ (‘Myös meidän sydämet voivat särkyä’), a new work by the artist Iiris Elena Rusi that examines the hostility directed at sex workers in Finland. The exhibition runs from 9 October to 29 November 2026 at the museum’s premises in the Cable Factory.
Rusi, born in 1991, is a Helsinki-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice deals with morality, sexuality and the power relations between society and the individual. She draws on her own experience and places herself on view, and the museum describes all of her works as performances. In this piece she is both the face and the narrator.
The work grows out of events in 2021. That February, Me Naiset magazine interviewed Rusi as a sex worker and visual artist for its Toisintekijä series. The article was widely shared, and comment sections filled with remarks about her appearance, her desirability and her morals. Afterwards, she recounts, a young man shouted an insult at her in Helsinki’s Asematunneli and walked away smiling.
In the exhibition, anonymous online commentators are set against images of sex workers going about their everyday work. Rusi met sex workers in person for the project: people of different ages who work voluntarily and independently and offer a range of services. All of them took part under pseudonyms, and Rusi does not know their real identities.
The work also points to a legal grey zone. In Finland, buying and selling sex privately is not illegal, yet the law does not recognise the terms ‘sex work’, ‘sex worker’ or ‘sex for payment’. According to the museum, the stigma attached to the work persists in 2026.
The exhibition is part of the museum’s 2025–26 programme ‘Textures of Security’, selected through an open call by the museum’s curatorial team and the invited curator Farbod Fakharzadeh, with support from the Finnish Heritage Agency. Tradeka is the main partner, with Pro AV Saarikko Oy as a partner.
