Ignorance Is Bliss Wish Not Knew Your Kiss

Group exhibition
The Bloody Summer Exhibition, Pori
9.-17.7.2026

Artists: Anna Breu, Anna-Sofia Sysser, Erno-Erik Raitanen, Henrik Heinonen, Suvi Härkönen, Suomi Kuvaa collective

“It is not just impossible to enjoy the stressfully white nights of the north. Nordic summers are like a cultural disease. Ancient Scandinavians were probably already tired of summer exhibitions and summer theatre when they imagined that there would be a three year long winter just before the last battle and the apocalypse. Why not? Sounds great. Three years of active, high quality art and science, then off to next dimension. Disease is neither a bad metaphor for summer art also following the fact that summer art is quite like hospital art. It should not bother people.

Art in hospitals and summer exhibitions is supposed to look like ‘art’, nothing else. It is produced so that everybody could say afterwards: “Oh yeah, we did do something else than just barbeque – burp – like, umh, I think we went to that summer exhibition, whatever its name was…”

-Max Ryynänen

The second Pori Biennale by Porin kulttuurisäätö is organised in Generaattori Gallery near Puuvilla shopping mall in July 2016. Saatanan kesänäyttely is about the Finnish summer and its expectations and the so-called “summer exhibition” traditions. The exhibition combines countryside romanticism to urban landscape.

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