Jenni Österlundin näyttely The Rehearsal:
Practising Our Ability to Disappear
Avajaiset pe 6.11. 2026

Jenni Österlund
The Rehearsal: Practising Our Ability to Disappear

7.11.-22.11.2026

The Rehearsal: Practising Our Ability to Disappear is a solo exhibition by Finnish visual artist Jenni Österlund that explores invisibility, historically associated with vulnerability and concealment, as a strategy of survival. The exhibition emerges from the artist's understanding of the end of the world as a source of cultural and personal fear. Österlund questions both this ingrained fear and the adequacy of our habitual ways of preparing for a crisis.

The hanging textile installation, reminiscent of camouflage, alludes to the contradiction of women's visibility: often hypervisible and overlooked at the same time. It draws on women's learned invisibility as a way of understanding the body not as a separate entity from nature, but as something porous and continuously shaped by its surroundings. The alternative is not simply another individual way to prepare for disaster, but a proposal that opens up space for togetherness.

During the exhibition, visitors are invited to slow down, move with attention and take part in the rehearsal, guided by the techno-driven soundscape of Michele Uccheddu. The sound, unseen, sets the rhythm for inhabiting the space. Building tension through repetition, the hypnotic rhythms create a sensory experience in which the body is attuned to the landscape.

Working with textile and sound, the exhibition blurs the boundaries between body and landscape, the human and the nonhuman. It proposes disappearing not as hiding or withdrawal, but as a form of agency: a way of staying present while becoming part of something larger. The Rehearsal shifts attention from familiar preparations for catastrophe towards interdependence and nonhuman life.

Through listening, we practise our ability to disappear.