Ilkka Halso

Viewing Room

Wednesday, 25 June 2025

Ilkka Halso

Rollercoaster, 2004
From the series Museum of Nature
50 x 67 cm

archival pigment print, diasec

With his series Museum of Nature (2000), Ilkka Halso created a variety of visuals that explore ambiguous dystopic futures in which nature has vanished due to the reckless exploitations of humanity. These works seek to raise awareness for the irreversible environmental changes that derive from our own actions. The playfulness of the sceneries, such as in Rollercoaster (2004) or Theatre I (2003), hits the viewer with its ironic undertone. Depleted nature appears either as a precious legacy that needs to be put under strict supervision and kept alive at all costs, or as being used purely for entertainment purposes.

Compared to other series of Halso’s, these works attempt to neglect aesthetic value and instead put more emphasis on reshaping our perception of nature as a resource and something to be exploited to a point of no return.