Kristiina Koskentola
Kristiina Koskentola is a Finnish born visual artist. She earned her PhD from the University of the Arts/ Chelsea College in London (2017). Currently she divides her time between Amsterdam, Helsinki, and Beijing, where she has overwintered for over a decade.
Her recent work evolves around polyvocal subjectivity and the agency of multiple co-actors (human and beyond), often through intersecting "peripheral", material and spiritual ecologies. Her multidisciplinary practice spans across various media including video, installation, interactive performative (cooking) projects, publications, and lectures. Transcultural and monistic perspectives and entanglements of beings, phenomena and environments are at the core of her practice. Engaged in collaborations, she seeks to mediate, speculate, and imagine de-centered, dialogic, and more-than-human futures that challenge the toxic binary logic of modernism and capitalism.
Koskentola has exhibited, conducted talks, screenings, lectures and workshops in diverse venues and contexts including Three Shadows Photography Art Center in Beijing, Temporary Gallery, Cologne, Gallery Lumen Travo Amsterdam, Zendai MoMA Shanghai, Skaftfel Centre for Visual Arts, Iceland, MACBA Barcelona, Gallery Hippolyte, Helsinki, Bio Art Society Helsinki, Sonic Acts Academy/ University of Amsterdam, Goethe-Institut Beijing, Museum De Lakenhal/Scheltema, Leiden, Star Gallery, Beijing, Charlois Speciaal, Rotterdam, Huangbian Station/ Times Museum Guangzhou, University of Amsterdam, 4th Baku Biennial of Conceptual Art in Azerbaijan, Central Academy Beijing, Finnish Academy of Art Helsinki, University of the Arts London, University of New Hampshire, Dutch Art Institute, University of Pittsburgh, Himalayas' Art Museum Shanghai, General Public Berlin,Dushanbe Art Ground,Tajikistan and Smart Project Space Amsterdam. In 2019 and 2020 she contributed to Frame Contemporary Art Finland’s Rehearsing Hospitalities program. In 2021 she participated to Macao Biennial curated by Qiu Zhijie.
Her works are to be found in important collections such as that of KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art and Kone Foundation, among others.
Her PhD Interconnected In-Between: On the dynamics of abjection, animism, temporality and location in nomadic art practice is a polyvocal journey that examines her installations from the sites of propagation : marginalised villages in the outskirts of Beijing and a forgotten Buddhist temple in Chongqing, Central China, through the production processes to exhibitions in global venues. This research makes a contribution to the field of contemporary art in the context of globalisation, nomadic subjectivity and the posthuman/postanthropocentric condition, new materialism and to visual language.
Learn more about Kristiina Koskentola’s written MA thesis (DAI, 2007): Art, Culture, Dirt and Magic.
Learn more about Kristiina’s ‘Life after DAI’ by means of her website.