The Contamination of Time

In June 2026, Kunsthalle Seinäjoki will open The Contamination of Time, a group exhibition curated by Erich Berger. The Contamination of Time displays works that tell stories of distant stars, the slow formation of landscapes and the inevitable end of life in a deep future.

In The Contamination of Time, you are invited to embark on a journey that unsettles familiar notions of time. At the heart of the exhibition lies the acknowledgment that the future is not a distant, fixed horizon but shaped in and by the present. What is to come is always already contaminated by what is at hand.

The artworks within The Contamination of Time remind us that we inhabit a world shaped not only by geological, ecological, and cosmic forces, but also by our own decisions, behaviour, and imaginaries. They call for attentiveness to time and our capacity to respond.

The exhibition encourages visitors to reflect on how their actions are entangled with time and their environment, and to recognize their agency in shaping futures. If we can imagine countless catastrophes and the end of the world, why shouldn’t we also imagine a world we wish to live in?

Artists of the exhibition
Petri Ala-Maunus (FIN)
Laura Beloff (FIN)
Andy Gracie (UK/ESP)
Katri Naukkarinen (FIN)
Aurora Del Rio (IT/ENG)
Elsa Salonen (FIN)
Emilia Tikka (Fin)
Leena and Oula A. Valkeapää (FIN)

Curator of the exhibition
Erich Berger is a curator, artist, and researcher based in Helsinki. He works at the University of Oulu in Finland, where he studies art that responds to the current environmental conditions through the lens of anthropology, geology and art.

The exhibition opening will be held in conjunction with Kalevan Navetta’s Summer day on June 12, 2026.