Britt Al-Busultan, Janika Herlevi & Natalia Kozieł-Kalliomäki:

Resistance

6. - 22.2.2026

Tue-Sun 14-18

Opening reception 5.2. 17-19, welcome!

Artists Britt Al-Busultan, Janika Herlevi, and Natalia Kozieł-Kalliomäki are welcoming the collaboration with alchemy and outdated technologies across three expanded cinema installations.

The artists found a shared home in the Vaasa-based artist-run filmlab Filmverkstaden, founded by Britt in 2010. Today, the lab stands as one of Finland’s most vibrant centres for analog film and photography practice where the voice for the medium is loudly articulated and enthusiasm for film becomes contagious.

The exhibition in gallery Oksasenkatu 11 presents three installations that offer a gentle yet powerful and resilient resistance to our clean and fast-paced world. Mechanically whirring film projectors are placed in the centre and insist on reinvention. The hand-processed photochemical films give endless possibilities and leave clear traces of imperfection. These marks become as fuel for a counter-point to simply “go with the flow” and pose an ongoing question: what’s new that can be slowly developed when working with film?

what comes around goes around Britt Al-Busultan expanded cinema installation 2025-2026

In the wake of the green energy transition, structures of modern technology arise in our landscape. With increased electrical infrastructure consisting of for example wind turbines, power plants, transmission stations, interconnected energy systems are all around us. Smart and clean. The belief in our salvation through the energy transition is unshaken. The expanded cinema installation what comes around goes around is a kind attempt of resistance in a fast-paced world where smart, clean and super-fast technology is celebrated as triumph, and everything else is regarded as unwanted, slow, obsolete and backwards. Through pulsating rhythms of light and darkness, and structures reduced to abstractions, it plays with the speed and motion of modern infrastructure in order to disrupt it.

Britt Al-Busultan works exclusively with analogue film. She has been researching expanded cinema extensively and working with alternative ways of making and showing images. Her works of expanded cinema can be characterised by their immersive and site specific qualities. In her film installations and live cinema performances, light, darkness, colour and motion become active agents in the space that interact with its viewers. She has been showing her works of expanded cinema internationally in exhibitions and festivals, such as Ann Arbor Film Festival, IFFR and AAVE. In 2010, she founded the artist-run film lab Filmverkstaden in Vaasa, Finland.

Ghost in the machine Janika Herlevi 16mm film, Planographic prints, animation 2021

Ghost in the machine is an installation consisting of 16mm analog film and planographic prints on paper mounted on mdf-board. It combines film- and paper-based matrices as the image is transferred by hand from one surface to another in the darkroom and in the printmaking studio. The starting point was a short strip of 16mm black & white film. Forgotten filter holder from the camera resulted in light leaking onto the film and ”drawing” a white line (black on a negative) throughout the entire film. What first felt like a fatal mistake soon became an interesting possibility and in the end an essential part of the whole construct. When transferring the ”floating” image from the top of its polyester base on to paper, it loses its ”perfect” photographic appearance. The human hand leaves its imperfect mark in the machine-made original. Both print makings - on polyester and on paper - come together in the resulting installation, with a touch of the unpredictable: the ghost in the machine.

Janika Herlevi (1978) is a visual artist based in Vaasa, Finland. Her work is developed at the intersection of printmaking, drawing and moving analogue film. For her these techniques are different ways of thinking, and manifest themselves in various forms and rhythms in her work.

Attempt of saying something Natalia Kozieł-Kalliomäki 16mm film and the blintz fold on paper 2025

Attempt of Saying Something is a film installation that brings together 16mm film, a simple school- type overhead projector, and ordinary sheets of paper in a shared projection space.

Rooted in Natalia’s ongoing fixation with photosensitive film and paper—materials that she often treats as an actors in her expanded-cinema performances—the work explores how minimal gestures can generate strong meaning. A simple act of folding a square sheet of paper towards its centre transforms something so fragile, common and everyday like into an abstract shape that trembling seems ready to speak.

Created in response to a world saturated with information, marked by political tension and escalating conflicts, the installation reflects a collective state of anxiety and overload. Surrounded by an endless clash of opinions, the work poses a quiet but urgent question: is it better to speak, or to remain silent?

Natalia Kozieł-Kalliomäki is a visual artist, Polish-original, living working, inventing and having fun in Helsinki; Finland. She’s exploring the substance of print through analog optical machinery and alchemy of film processes. She aims to uncover how traditional film projecting can be reinvented to tell layered stories within images, where simple illusions become enigmatic and impossible gets present.
She entered film form studying painting and printmaking, where collected that strong sense of texture, color dynamics and ongoing fixation towards paper. Today she’s mostly working with 16mm film expanded film installations and cinema performances. Optical machinery of film projectors, slide projectors or simple magic lanterns always function as her primary tools and overhead projector as her beloved instrument when performing with film.
Natalia’s installations and performances has been shown internationally and locally in the galleries, festivals and other art contexts including: Midnight Sun Film Festival, LUFF; Lausanne Underground Film & Music festival, The Barcelona Independent Film Festival l’Alternativa, ANIMOCJE; International Film Festival in Poland. Her new expanded-cinema performance Oho! is going to be premiered on March at OK LÀ! festival in Montreal, and screened in Quebec and Toronto.