Kristiina Mäenpää’s exhibition Remains of the waves and the works of vapour, on display in Konstepidemin’s Boiler room, is a site-specific installation that consists of rock salt and steel. The exhibition weaves a network of meanings between the materialities of the artwork and the exhibition space, and between the temporal layers they contain.

Remains of the waves and the works of vapour draw from the circulation of matter, energy and meanings. The salt sculptures formed by the means of heat and evaporation settle in the Boiler room, a space previously used for heat production, as if becoming part of its humming structures. The newly crystallized forms of the salt seem porous, like they were breathing an ongoing motion. The encounter between the work and the space intertwines the subsurface pasts – the origin of the salt in the waves of long-gone oceans and the heat-washed skin of the former boiler room.

Kristiina Mäenpää works with installation, sculpture, and techniques based on analog photography. Her site-sensitive works emphasize the dialogue between the artwork and the exhibition space, as well as the thematics of temporality and trace. In addition to spatiality, the properties of materials and their associated meanings, such as their deep time histories, play a central role in her works. Her works are also characterized by slow changes that occur during the exhibition due to the effects of the present conditions. The role of time in Mäenpää’s practice is to act as a kind of working partner and a way of approaching impermanence as a part of the natural course of life.

The artist’s work has been funded by the Kone Foundation.

Bio

Kristiina Mäenpää (b.1990) is a Helsinki-based visual artist. The recent years her works have been exhibited at K17 – Space for art and ecology (Sipoo, 2025), Photographic gallery Hippolyte (Helsinki, 2025), Helsinki art Museum’s HAM gallery (2024) and at galerié Anhava (Helsinki, 2023). Mäenpää received her MFA in Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki in 2023, and MA in Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in 2024. Her work is currently supported by the Kone Foundation.