Ronit Keret: Topographies of Collapse (Hall 1) and Spartak Khachanov: Planet P (Hall 2)

Topography of Collapse, Ronit Keret’s first solo exhibition in Finland, unfolds as a landscape of fractured surfaces and unstable matter: a fissured glacier constructed from discarded white Styrofoam packaging; suspended luminous images; the video work Melting; drawings made with glue on velvet; and ink works on paper. Through these materials, Keret transforms the gallery into a space of quiet disturbance, where fragility, rupture, and ecological anxiety converge into a charged visual field. 

Styrofoam is a substance made to protect, insulate, and preserve, while remaining almost impossible to erase. It resembles ice in its color, texture, and apparent fragility, yet it is a synthetic, petroleum-based material that resists decomposition and persists in the environment long after its original use. In Keret’s hands, these contradictory qualities remain unresolved: the material recalls a natural formation while simultaneously pointing to systems of extraction, consumption, and ecological damage. 

The exhibition grows out of Keret’s long-standing engagement with the climate crisis, yet it does not depict environmental destruction in a literal or documentary manner. Rather, it stages collapse as a physical and visual condition: through fractures, cavities, unstable forms, and images of landscapes in the process of disappearance. Within this space, nature no longer appears as untouched, remote, or sublime, but as something already mediated, damaged, reconstructed, and increasingly replaced. 

The video work Melting, shot at the fourteenth-century fortress of Château de La Napoule in the south of France, imagines the historic site engulfed by floods caused by melting glaciers and rising sea levels. The work introduces a temporal dimension of dissolution, drift, and submersion, unfolding gradually from rainfall into a vision of ecological catastrophe. 

Instability continues in two series of drawings: one made with plastic glue on vivid blue velvet, the other with ink on paper. Through sparse yet insistent lines that branch, bend, and intersect, the works evoke thickets, currents, glaciers, or skeletal structures, without ever settling into fixed description. 

Scattered across the wall and descending onto the floor, an installation of small light boxes creates an abstract presence within the gallery. Connected by long red electrical cords that remain exposed and visually dominant, the light boxes form a fragile constellation in which illumination, connection, and instability become visibly entwined. 

Perhaps what Keret brings into view is not merely a lament for a nature already lost, but a more troubling recognition: that the natural and the artificial can no longer be clearly separated, and that the landscapes we mourn may already be landscapes we have helped to fabricate. 

Curator: Vera Pilpoul 

Spartak Khachanov is a multimedia artist and political refugee living and working in Helsinki, Finland. During his asylum process, he spent two years living in a refugee reception centre in Vantaa. His artistic practice is shaped by lived experience of displacement, political instability, and forced migration. He explores themes of war, nationalism, state violence, propaganda, and collective memory. For him, these are not abstract concepts but conditions that have directly shaped his life over the past decades. 

Khachanov works across sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, graphics, photography, land art, video, animation, and sound. Moving between media allows him to construct fragmented narratives that reflect the instability of political and personal histories. His practice is rooted in long-term research projects that connect personal biography with broader geopolitical structures. One of these projects, Planet P, investigates how military power, ideology, and national identity are constructed and performed through symbols, rituals, and visual culture.

Khachanov is particularly interested in how societies normalize militarisation and transform violence into spectacle and collective belief. He has been working as an artist for over 13 years. His first professional exhibition took place in Kyiv in 2013. Since then, he has participated in exhibitions and projects internationally, while continuing to develop work in Finland. Through his practice, he aims to create spaces where political realities can be examined through fictional, symbolic, and speculative forms. He is interested in how art can both reflect and distort reality in order to reveal underlying systems of power.

HAA Galleria

31.7.-23.8.2026

Tue–Thu 12–18 
Fri–Sat 12–16
Sun 12–16
 

Free entry