LEENA JULIN — THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY

8.5. – 21.6.2026. Exhibition opens on 7.5.2026 at 18-20.

“Around God, there forms a Choir of prayers and Ceremonies and Rituals and Priests and Churchmen, until Finally God Dies. And not everyone always notices this.”

(Abraxas in Terry Pratchett. Small Gods. Finnish ed. Hämeenlinna: Karisto, 2004, 158)

Can death — or life — be shaped into a theological doctrine? How do readymade texts encounter a human being, and what does it look like when a system responds to a human need?

The exhibition explores humanity within Christian culture primarily through two questions: how to encounter another human being, and how to encounter the finitude of life. It examines the relationship between humanity and systematization, and how the encounter with human life and death unfolds within that relationship. How have things been articulated, and what kind of reality words create? Does the church explain how things are? Can church still be a church if it only reflected? Offering locked-in answers makes universally human—and thus recognizable—questions harder to recognize. Although people long for continuity and stability, a rigid system hardly is the answer. What has remained recognizable throughout the ages are the kinds of experiences that occur in human lives across all times.

On the other hand, does a prayer or religious phrase necessarily—or at all—carry insight into reality simply because some people understand it in a certain way? Can one find genuine meaning in such words without subscribing to the dogma built around them?