Curator of the exhibition: Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė
Exhibition technician: Laura Skučaitė
The architects of the exhibition space: Matas Šatūnas and Laura Kaminskaitė
Visual graphics: Kornelija Zizaitė
Documentation images: Darius Matonis

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In the exhibition the artist Kristoffer Ala-Ketola dives into themes of body horror, mistake, and death, unraveling the fragile paradoxes of existence. With haunting precision, the works in the exhibition weave a narrative of desire, vulnerability, and resilience, inviting everyone to confront the disquieting edges of humanity and the unknown.

In the exhibition sculptural forms, videos, and painted surfaces echo the fragmented shapes of exoskeletons and medieval armor—structures meant to shield, but here, they fail or dissolve, revealing the gaps and wounds within. These protective shells, rather than ensuring safety, expose the space between containment and collapse, strength and decay. Holes punctuate the works, disrupting their integrity, and invite everyone to peer into voids that evoke both terror and fascination.

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Through this exhibition, the artist will explore the biomorphic, the mysterious, and the psyche’s adaptation to life’s challenges through moving images, sculpture, and painting. Ala-Ketola’s work, presented as a mind map of interwoven forms, employs exoskeleton and medieval armor motifs to explore vulnerability and strength.

His pieces draw connections between the resilience of nature, as seen in crustacean exoskeletons, and human-made armor—both representing protective instincts and transformative potential. Ala-Ketola’s work particularly resonates with queer culture’s themes of self-protection and evolution, inviting viewers to reflect on their own resilience.

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Enter the unsettling realm of the grotesque and visceral—a world where the body transforms into a site of rupture and possibility. Here the artist Kristoffer Ala-Ketola dives into themes of body horror, the mistake, and death, unraveling the fragile paradoxes of existence. With haunting precision, the works in the exhibition weave a narrative of desire, vulnerability, and resilience, inviting everyone to confront the disquieting edges of humanity and the unknown.

In these surroundings, sculptural forms, videos, and painted surfaces echo the fragmented shapes of exoskeletons and medieval armor—structures meant to shield, but here, they fail or dissolve, revealing the gaps and wounds within. These protective shells, rather than ensuring safety, expose the space between containment and collapse, strength and decay. Holes punctuate the works, disrupting their integrity, and invite everyone to peer into voids that evoke both terror and fascination.  

The idea of the mistake—unexpected, chaotic, generative—emerges as a force within Ala-Ketola’s practice. The ruptures and aberrations in the sculptures are not errors to be corrected but critical sites of tension and potential. They try to confront the viewer with the discomfort of the grotesque, inviting contemplation of the ways bodies, identities, and psyches navigate and survive disruption.  

The exhibition channels the language of queer theory, anchoring its imagery in themes of transformation, longing, and resilience. “The hole” becomes a motif of absence and presence: a portal, a wound, a site of possibility. The works evoke a distorted intimacy, creating spaces where the fantastical collides with the real, the human with the monstrous.  

By expanding the boundaries of speculative portraiture and landscape narrative, Kristoffer crafts an immersive web of associations that explore the precarious balance between the beauty and horror of the body. The artist compels viewers to confront their own fears, vulnerabilities, and desires—offering a mirror to the fragile exoskeletons we carry with us.