Back to Index
MOMENTUM AiR
Artist & Curatorial Residency
Alba Ala-Pietilä & Eero Karjalainen
2 May – 30 September 2026
Alba Ala-Pietilä
Alba Ala-Pietilä is a Finnish poet and a literary critic. For her first poetry book Säiliö (engl. Vessel) published in 2025 she was granted The Young Poet of the Year award. Säiliö was also nominated as the only poetry book among seven finalists in the prestigious Helsingin Sanomat literary award that is given out to the best debut book of the year.
Currently Ala-Pietilä is working on her second book of poetry, an epic poem studying the themes of alienation, sacredness and the disappearing and recreation of language. Ala-Pietilä approaches her writing as artistic research and is especially interested in writing as decreation, the possibilities of generating new language and the relations between poetry and picture. Her prior work has been published in Finnish but currently she is writing in English as well.
In addition to her artistic work she regularly writes reviews to the central cultural and literary magazines in Finland. In this area of her work, as well, she is pivoting towards the English-speaking sphere.
Eero Karjalainen
Eero Karjalainen is a critic and curator based in Helsinki and Berlin. He works as a doctoral researcher in art history University of Helsinki, and is curator at Sunnyside, a not-for-profit exhibition space in Helsinki with a sister space Portland, in Zürich, Switzerland. Karjalainen’s writing and editorial work has been published by Flash Art, University of the Arts, and Noniin Magazine, amongst others. He’s research and writing focuses on epistemologies of artistic and curatorial research, art criticism, and the ecological in contemporary art. Karjalainen has taught art theory and history at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Arts, Helsinki.
Karjalainen’s research project examines the development of artistic research in the visual arts in Europe and especially Finland from the 1970s to the 2020s. While artistic research has become institutionalized since the 1990s, its longer history, conceptual evolution, and artists’ research practices have not been systematically studied. The project aims to provide the first historical account of practice-based research in Finnish art, focusing particularly on how artists use technological tools to produce and model knowledge within their works. The project contributes to ongoing debates on the role of technology in art and positions it as an active agent within artistic processes.