Object of Devotion
Ville Laurinkoski, Matti Sumari
15.05 – 14.06 2026

Vernissage: Friday, 15 May, 18.00–21.00

Join us for the opening of our spring exhibition Object of Devotion, featuring works by Ville Laurinkoski and Matti Sumari.

rusty steel, radiant magenta shelves,
1980s gay porn, towering sculptures scraping the heavens,
urinal dividers,
textured ambient soundscapes,
soft sinking mattresses 

Object of Devotion gathers a delicious mix of sculpture, sound, installation, and performance. The exhibition lingers on two artistic practices that are charged with material intensity, affect, and critical force. Here matter is unravelled: how it behaves, what it signifies, and how it structures perception. The artists move in varying conceptual directions, generating productive dissonance.

In Object of Devotion, sculpture is approached as a vessel of time, repetition, and touch. The works carry traces of labour and use – fingerprints, lumpy glue, grease, blue-green patina. Each element is part of a ritual of discipline and experimentation, testing the limits of the medium, returning to it again and again, and refusing closure. The work does not settle; it accumulates. It persists. 

Across the exhibition, an object of devotion is that which holds attention with an almost sacred intensity. It can be a gesture, a voice, a forgotten text, a piece of abandoned scrap, or an artistic method that gathers force through return. Devotion is not fixed. It is a process, a sustained recurrence, an orientation towards something that never resolves, but continues to hold.  

About the artists:

Ville Laurinkoski (b. 1996, Finland) is a visual artist and performer based in Copenhagen. Alongside his studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Visual Arts, and Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule, Laurinkoski completed the Maumaus Independent Study Programme in Lisbon in 2021. Laurinkoski creates suggestive interiors and chamber pieces composed of mass-produced objects and misfit materials, unpurposed furniture, and readymades, often infused with voice and speech, in the form of sound or live performance. Drawing on literature, autobiographical writing, pasts of gay activism, and commercial music, his artistic practice serves as a form of critique, producing an aesthetic that exposes and subverts the socio-economic, linguistic, and spatial systems that script our lives. Laurinkoski is supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland and The Danish Arts Foundation.

Matti Sumari (b. 1987, Finland), lives and works in Malmö, Sweden, and graduated with an MFA from Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in 2014. He is a co-founder of Alta Art Space, an artist-run exhibition space in Malmö formed in 2015. Sumari works in a defunct ketchup factory on the outskirts of Malmö, a post-industrial landscape where materials are sourced from a landfill just below the studio. His work explores the resources that can be extracted from urban surroundings – free slag materials, by-products of contemporary life – sorted out through the city’s metabolism into dump sites. The ingredients gathered are most often, in their prior functions, already involuntary social sculptures. Sumari gathers, alters and reinforces their purpose through homemade versions of industrial processes.

Curator: Tawanda Appiah

Technicians: Jenny Berg, Linus Svensson

Skånes konstförening is supported by Malmö City, Region Skåne and the Swedish Arts Council.