Exhibitions
ART CENTER AHJO, KYTÖ/LIEKKI-SPACE: ¿HABLAS ESPAÑOL?
MARKUS JÄNTTI - ¿HABLAS ESPAÑOL? 1.10.-19.10.2025
In Markus Jäntti's exhibition ¿Hablas español? unicorns leave Finland behind and head for the Spanish sun. The exhibition features Jäntti's single-channel, puppet theater-like video work (13 min), completed in 2025. The actress Emilia Pokkinen provides the voice acting for the work.
The video work deals with the domestication of animals through symbols. In the work, unicorns engage in equestrian sports, which raises the question of what moral justification one animal species has for exploiting a closely related species for its own economic gain. The video's location in Tenerife, Spain, serves as a commentary on reality TV productions filmed abroad, in which the destination country serves only as an exotic backdrop.
The domestication of animals, or the breeding of wild animals for practical use, has been a central theme in Jäntti's artistic work since the 2019 Unicorn Stories exhibition. For food, work, companionship, or other benefits, animals have been bred in such a way that their behavior, physiology, and even appearance have changed as a result of human choice. Domestication has been addressed in art throughout different eras. It is a particularly prominent theme in prehistoric cave paintings, which depict wild animals and humans' early relationships with them, but in medieval manuscripts, for example, animals often appeared as allegorical figures. Contemporary art has raised more critical perspectives and addressed, among other things, the ethics of domestication.
Markus Jäntti is a Finnish-born visual artist, living and working between Berlin and Espoo. He graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the Berlin University of the Arts under Professor Robert Lucander and participated in the Hunter College “Studio Art” Master Program in New York. He has been awarded, among others, the Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium des Landes Berlin and the Finnish Art Society’s young artist grant. He is currently the visiting lecturer at the Berlin University of the Arts.
