Drifts Festival brings Anna Pesonen and Hongxi Li to Helsinki
Drifts Festival (opens a new window)returns for its fifth edition, taking place from August 14th to September 10th in Helsinki, Finland. As part of this year’s programme, Associate Curator Nimco Kulmiye Hussein (opens a new window) has selected two artists, Anna Pesonen (opens a new window) and Hongxi Li (opens a new window), for the thematic strand Unknown Territories: Forests, curated by Soko Hwang. This curatorial focus explores the forest as a complex terrain of memory, displacement, extraction and survival.
This year’s programme follows the Finnish Institute’s 2024 mobility support for Lucia Rebolino (Forensic Architecture), whose work Ecocide in Gaza lecture investigated the systematic targeting of orchards and greenhouses by Israeli forces since October 2023. Their analysis revealed that this destruction is a widespread and deliberate act of ecocide that has exacerbated the ongoing catastrophic famine in Gaza and is part of a wider pattern of deliberately depriving Palestinians of critical resources for survival.
Featured Artists DRIFTS 2025
Anna Pesonen
Heed the Echoes of the Forgotten is an acoustic sculpture and sound installation that explores Karelia as a contested sonic landscape shaped by war, surveillance and cultural erasure. Drawing on Second World War military technologies, Pesonen reclaims the form of the parabolic acoustic mirror, once a tool of extinction, and transforms it into a space of cultural preservation. The piece features newly commissioned vocals by ethnomusicologist and musician Karoliina Kantelinen, one of the last living practitioners of kelkettely, a near-extinct Karelian singing tradition. Recorded by pioneering Finnish sound engineer Risto Hemmi and presented through Genelec speakers, the piece offers a high-fidelity encounter with a near-extinct tradition. A live performance by Pesonen and Kantelinen will further activate the work, connecting ancestral sound with contemporary practice. The work creates a sensorial space that holds grief, resilience and the embodied memory of displacement.
Hongxi Li
Sandcastle is a 30-minute performance in which Li inhabits Jolene, a fictional persona navigating a child-scaled, moss-covered garden enclosed by wrought iron. Through gestures of play such as building, removing and mimicking, Jolene echoes cycles of ecological erasure and territorial imposition. Drawing from British colonial design and performed on Finnish soil, the work stages an unsettling encounter between intrusion and intimacy, control and care. It asks who land truly belongs to and at what cost.
Together, these works reimagine the forest not as untouched wilderness but as a living archive of displacement, survival and the slow work of remembering.
The featured artists are funded by The Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland.
People behind the project
Anna Pesonen
Anna Pesonen on suomalais-karjalainen, Lontoossa asuva poikkitaiteellinen taiteilija ja kuvanveistäjä. Hänen työskentelynsä liikkuu kuvanveiston, äänen ja paikkasidonnaisten installaatioiden rajapinnoilla. Pesosen teokset käsittelevät ajankohtaisia ilmiöitä, kuten misinformaation synnyttämää polarisaatiota, solastalgiaa sekä sosio-poliittista hajaannusta.
Hongxi Li
Hongxi Li on Lontoossa asuva taiteilija, jonka työskentely tutkii ihmisten käyttäytymisen ja yhteiskunnallisten rakenteiden kompleksisuutta veistotaiteen, äänen, hajujen, installaation, videon ja esitystaiteen keinoin. Liin teokset käsittelevät yritysmaailman vaikutusvaltaa, valtasuhteita ja emotionaalista epämukavuutta. Teoksissa teollisesti tuotetut arjen esineet käyvät läpi muodonmuutoksen ja syntyvät uudelleen käsityönä, perinteisten valmistustekniikoiden, kuten metallityön, keramiikan ja verhoilun avulla.