Anu Halmesmaa (Hall 1):
The Formula of Immortality

"I graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki in 2010 and am a member of the Finnish Sculptors’ Society. My work centers on spatial sculptural installations, through which I explore the relationship between humans and nature, corporeality, and the tension between mortality and immortality. 

In 2025, I made the largest exhibition of my career, The Formula of Immortality, at WAM Kilta Gallery. In this exhibition, I further developed my wall sculpture technique toward a more three-dimensional and spatial expression, and the show broke the gallery’s visitor record (10,088 visitors). In the same year, I created a commissioned participatory three-dimensional sculpture for the Oulu Art Museum as part of the Alakkonää Abstraktia exhibition. The work will remain in the museum’s collection and will be permanently displayed in the lobby of the new children’s museum. My first public artwork, a six-part wall relief, was completed for Kaarina House in 2020. 

This year, I continue working with The Formula of Immortality theme, which engages with the acceptance of death and presents fantasies of immortality through a rich, fairytale-like aesthetic. It brings together forms found in nature with the fleshy human body and floral, shimmering spaces, where immortality appears as a constructed illusion—a space through which humans attempt to conceal their own mortality and the fleeting nature of life.  

In these works, immortality is not a goal or a solution, but a continuous movement—an uncertain attempt to understand and accept the limits of human life. Constructing illusion becomes a way to approach what cannot be fully confronted: death, disappearance, and cycles larger than the self. At the same time, the works ask what happens when humans distance themselves from the natural process of dying and seek to control it. Can the illusion of immortality ultimately alienate us from life itself? Or is it precisely this illusion that keeps us moving—building, searching, and reaching toward something that always remains just out of reach? 

The body of work expands into a space that the viewer does not simply observe, but enters—becoming part of its rhythm, layers, and structure of meaning. The space becomes an experience where aesthetic excess and existential content intertwine—a place where the fantasy of immortality and the awareness of mortality are inseparable. Death is not directly depicted, but emerges through subtle shifts, small disturbances, and almost imperceptible nuances. Joy, vitality, and transience intertwine without a clear hierarchy. 

The starting point of my work is a need to understand—not to resolve, but to remain with the question. I seek to grasp my relationship to mortality, to other people, and to the cycles of nature. At the same time, I recognize a desire to resist this cycle: an urge to preserve, to halt, and to make permanent something that is inherently transient. 

I do not aim to represent immortality. I construct its longing, its illusion—and a space in which that longing can momentarily feel real." 

Notice! Opening hours: Tuesday–Thursday 12–18, Friday–Sunday 12–16