Role of public art at Aalto University

The book consists of nine thematic articles on public art from the perspectives of wellbeing, business, design, aesthetics and curating. Many of the authors have been involved in the procurement processes of the artworks as jury members or curators.   

The artists will present their own works at the unveiling of the art collection of K1, K2 and K3 buildings. 

Bassam el Baroni is Associate Professor in curating and mediating art in the Department of Art and Media at Aalto University. His recent research lies at the intersection of curatorial practice/studies, theory, technology, and economics. El Baroni is an internationally recognised curator who has curated and co-curated biennials of contemporary art in Spain, Norway, Ireland, and Lebanon. Most recently, he curated the exhibition exhibition Infrahauntologies  at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art (Oldenburg, Germany) in 2021 and La Box (ENSA Bourges, France) in 2022.

With backgrounds in visual arts and cultural studies, IC-98 (Patrik Söderlund & Visa Suonpää, founded in 1998) has produced artist publications, site- and context- specific projects and interventions, animated moving image installations and short films. Their work addresses the environmental crisis and artistic-political methods of finding solutions to it. The projects seek to replace an anthropocentric worldview with modes better suited to take into consideration the interrelationships, dependencies and myriad temporal rhythms of all animate and inanimate nature. While the moving image works are allegorical descriptions of time, climate, and how environmental and cultural histories merge in different eras, the site-specific projects have, instead of mere artistic depiction sought to create tools – free zones, novel languages, new founding myths – to help the community of all organisms emerge from the crisis. 

Gloria Lauterbach specialises in artistic research and works as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Design at Aalto University as part of the NorDark project, where the  aim is to mediate the needs of people and wildlife wildlife in Nordic after-dark environments. Lauterbach holds a diploma in design & sustainability (ecosign / Akademie für Gestaltung, Cologne,  Germany) and a PhD in Arts & Design (Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture). Her passion is to better understand and to make better understandable topics around  material cooperation, dialogical post-humanism, more-than-human-centric methodologies, modes of habitation, post-disaster futures and urban wilderness.

Pekka Mattila serves as an Associate Professor at the Aalto University School of Business. In addition to his academic activities, he has conducted an extensive business career. He holds a doctoral and Master’s degrees in sociology from the University of Helsinki and an Executive MBA from the London Business School. He is a Member of the Board of the Finnish National Gallery and is also known as an avid collector of contemporary and modern art. 

Ossi Naukkarinen is Aalto University’s Vice President for Research and Professor of Aesthetics. He has also worked as Vice Dean of both Education and Research in the university’s School of Art, Design and Architecture. He has published monographs and articles on, for example, environmental and everyday aesthetics, the nature of aesthetics as an academic discipline and new digital research approaches to aesthetics. 

Susanna Pettersson is CEO of the Finnish Cultural Foundation (beginning June 2023), and Adjunct Professor in museology at the University of Jyväskylä. She has worked for more than three decades at art museums in Finland and Sweden. Her curatorial practice includes exhibitions that explore 19th century Finnish art, women artists, and the relation between the classical works and contemporary art. She was a Member of the Board of Aalto University during 2014-2020. 

Maria Elisabeth Rehbinder (LL.M, University of Helsinki) works as Senior Legal Counsel for Aalto University. Before joining the university, she previously worked as a lawyer for a copyright collecting society. Rehbinder advises students and staff on legal questions related to copyright, trademarks, design right and personal data. She has been involved in the agreements and agreement processes of art acquisition, exhibitions and communications of Aalto University. She is a member of the Copyright Council of the Ministry of Education and a member of International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP). She was responsible for the project of translating the Creative Commons 4.0 copyright licenses into Finnish.  

Outi Turpeinen works as a Manager responsible for the Strategic Exhibitions entities and Public Art Collections at Aalto University. She loves to work with multi-disciplinary projects, which all give an opportunity to learn more about the world. She has been actively participating in impacting the art and design field as a board member for several organisations. She is also an awarded artist and Doctor of Arts.