Auri Vento: Looking for Willing Participants

Turku Artist’s Association’s Iso Galleria March 6th–22th 2026
WELCOME to the exhibition opening on Thursday, March 5th, 6-8 pm!

The March exhibition in Iso Galleria is Looking for Willing Participants by Auri Vento, Turku Artists’ Association’s Artist of the Year 2025.

Auri Vento is a Turku-based visual artist working multi-materially. Vento uses techniques of installation, sculpting, and painting in their work. They are a 4th year visual arts student in Turku Arts Academy. In their recent work Vento has explored the gaze and the practices of being in a space, centering on the experiences of belonging and not belonging, and looking and being looked at. The works use the methods of furniture manufacturing. Their shapes and materials refer to a lived environment. You are allowed to touch the works.

Vento is interested in the repetitive and strenuous nature of physical work, and how in art this work is somehow aimless, without certainty of its usefulness. Manual work is a central part of Vento’s artistic work. Hands know how hard you need to press, where the fingers are, and how to place the knife against the wood just so; how to pull the knife towards the thumb, to carve out a thin chip; how the blade presses against the softness of the thumb, but doesn’t cut through.

”Yesterday, I used nail scissors, tweezers, and sowing needle to dig up a bee’s stinger from my sole. I had been walking from the sauna towards the house when I felt a sudden sting in my foot, emanating heavy pain. Quite different from pine needles, cones, or gravel under my feet, or the soles of different shoes. This new touch resembled a headache in the sole, and not a tired ache, but a feverish one, a red pain telling me something is very wrong. As a kid, when I had a fever I would dream of a very small world and a very red sky. The world might be coming to an end. My father and sisters were there, but the death of my mother was too big a thing to deal, even in delirious dreams.”