SPACE, The Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki and the Saastamoinen Foundation are pleased to announce Tatu Gustafsson as the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki alumni artist in residence for 2023 – 2024. The three-month residency period starts in spring 2024.

Tatu Gustafsson works with various mediums, including weather cameras, borrowed objects, and concepts. The starting points of his works often involve exploring technologies, common assumptions, and hierarchical relationships. Lately, Tatu has been particularly interested in pictures made by weather cameras, unfolding an artwork at the textual level and using podcast platforms as an way of presenting art.

Since 2015, art has led Tatu in various different situations. He has, for example, lived in a house that has no handles, travelled around Finland making self-portraits with weather cameras, and lived without a phone or, in another piece, without his shoes. It’s always been important for him that the process of making art also effects and changes his everyday life.

Tatu is also interested in different ways of presenting art. His experimental works have used different digital platforms including Instagram, New York Times comment section and PDF-files to explore possibilities that art has outside the traditional venues such as galleries and museums.

During the residency with SPACE, Tatu will be gathering new material from weather cameras located around Finland. Since 2022 he has been saving photos from thousands of pictures that these automatic cameras take every day. This ongoing project is motivated by an interest in landscape photography, its ethics and power structures.

The Residency Grant at SPACE is supported by The Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki in partnership with Saastamoinen Foundation.