Adel Abidin Birth place and date: Baghdad, 1973 Place of residence: Helsinki Education: MFA, Academy of Fine Arts (Helsinki); BA, Academy of Fine Arts (Baghdad); B.Sc. in Industrial Management, Mansour University, Baghdad.

Finland’s next major contemporary art export Adel Abidin works with humour and sarcasm, but he is no pedlar of cheap laughs.

THE NAME Adel Abidin has been on many lips in the art community lately. A rising name in the international scene of contemporary art, 36-year-old Abidin’s works have been exhibited in museums and galleries all over the world, and his first major solo exhibition in Finland opened in February in Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. SixDegrees spoke with Abidin the day after the opening.

Making jokes about his hangover, Abidin notes that he really feels like he is Finnish – and not just in terms of alcohol use. Abidin is living and working in Europe but rooted in another culture. Born in Baghdad, he moved to Finland in 2001. He entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki and switched painting for video art, installations and other contemporary techniques. Dealing with themes of identity, alienation and controversial issues of otherness, war and sexuality, Abidin’s works quickly got the attention of the art world.

In 2007 he was one of two artists representing Finland in the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with his work Abidin Travels. The installation, currently displayed in a truncated form in the Kiasma atrium, features a fictional travel agency promoting holiday trips to war-torn Baghdad –”Much more than a holiday!” Handout brochures give helpful advice to avoid going out in the morning, since it’s the time when suicide bombers are most active, and to keep in mind that American tanks have the right to shoot or drive over your car if they think it’s in the way.

The joke is so macabre, so ostensibly cruel it leaves the viewer with a lingering sense of unease that is hard to shake.

The main exhibition on the fourth floor opens with a neon sign of a mirror image Coca-Cola logo. A few years ago a conspiracy theory circled the internet, claiming that the logo, when read backwards, read ”No Mohammed, No Mecca” in Arabic. But Abidin reads it as ”To Mohammed, To Mecca,” flipping the conspiracy upside down. The next room contains Bread of Life, a video installation of a band of Egyptian nightclub belly dance drummers playing rock-hard stale loafs of bread.

Humour and irony are central to his language, Abidin states, and where it’s found, his humour tends to be of the wry, deadpan, so-poignant-it-hurts kind.

From the ancient Romans via the Big Top to the modern stage, circus has kept us enthralled for thousands of years. Its remarkable ability to adapt and evolve to maintain the fascination of audiences over time is what makes it unique.

WHILE the children of the 30s were wowed by the emergence of the “talkies” – cinematic films with both images and synchronised sound – the modern day teenager thinks nothing of playing tennis on their Wii, setting people on fire in real time and examining the computer generated world of Pandora in three dimensions.

Questions of nationality, citizenship and identity are sometimes complicated issues. But when it comes to sports things start to really get messy. Just ask handball champion Maria Hyppönen.

MARIA HYPPÖNEN admits she is a little excited. Tomorrow she has an appointment at the police station to submit her application to become a Finnish citizen. Despite her unmistakably Finnish-sounding name, Hyppönen, 32, only has one Finnish grandparent. She was born in Ukraine, at the time a part of the Soviet Union, and after almost two decades in Finland she has no Finnish citizenship, and only an alien’s passport, which is given to Finnish residents who can’t get a passport from any other country.

Playing second fiddle to the Bollywood dream 

India’s Bollywood is the largest film industry in the world, offering the tantalising lure of fortune and fame in a country where 220 million people live below the poverty line.

MUMBAI is where Indians come to get rich. With the average wage here three times the national average, the streets are bulging with the hustle of touts, cabs, people, markets and beggars, all engaged in a mad scramble for rupees.

WEERUSKA is a cosy tavern located in Helsinki’s lively suburb of Alppiharju. A few steps from the entrance lies the Linnanmäki amusement park. Just around the corner are Alppipuisto and Lenininpuisto, two very popular outdoor areas for summer concerts and winter sledging. The restaurant is an established classic in the neighbourhood, with long traditions and a dedicated platoon of hardcore regulars. With scant regard to fads and bandwagons, Weeruska caters to folks who prefer unpretentious food and like to get more bang for their buck.

TODAY’S theatre-goers have grown used to (some even weary of) multimedia experiments and envelope-pushing productions. Younger viewers should be no exception. Catering to that demand, Danish art collaboration Graense-Loes brings their production Fucking Alone to Helsinki for the Bravo! International Theatre Festival for Children and Youth.

Graense-Loes’ award-winning audiovisual performance grasps the difficult topic of human loneliness and focuses on people using technology instead of having real world contacts. Fucking Alone is described as a multimedia puppet theatre, with video projections and virtual media taking the stage as co-actors. The performance has gained international accolades, and teenagers and adults alike have enjoyed its modern object theatre and thought-provoking subject.

CARTOON characters once restricted to the kid’s department now festoon adult apparel. Walk into any H&M or Sokos in Finland and you are bombarded with Snoopy, Tweety and Hello Kitty on anything from lingerie to lip gloss, all unmistakeably marketed to adults. Is this a vain attempt to reclaim childhood innocence or another marketing ploy embraced by a consumer society?

Merchandising turns any object into a commodity. Children’s merchandising has been strongly connected to children’s films and TV shows, while adult merchandising, previously based mostly on sports team items for fans, has also begun to exploit adult love for music, film and TV. Cartoons have long appealed to adults for their humour, so adults might also want to wear Spongebob or Shrek T-shirts.

DURING A WINTER like this one, when the whole country is blanketed with snow, the best maintained and illuminated tracks tend to get crowded. Turning your skis towards virgin snow, however, requires a completely new set of equipment, namely forest skis.

Compared to the ordinary cross-country skis, forest skis are much longer (240-280 cm) and wider (7 cm), which is why they float nicely, even in deep snow. One could always opt for snowshoes but they don’t glide like skis do. The tip of the forest ski is slightly narrow and soft as a birch branch. This means that the tip will always stay on the surface even in conditions of poor or powdery snow.

NOW that you’ve scoffed your cut-price Runeberg’s tortes and enjoyed the gluttonous cream-fest that is Shrovetide, don’t forget that on 28 February some poor, cake-bloated individual will drag themselves outside to hoist the flag yet again for Kalevala Day. On this day we celebrate the national epic, an oral tradition collected from the firesides of 19th century Finland and given the form of print by Elias Lönnrot. But what does Kalevala actually mean to the average Finn? SixDegrees asked a few people.

“It’s full of rape, murder and robbery. Like normal Finnish life. Väinämöinen somehow had something to do with the creation of the world. I think a sea-duck laying an egg came into it somehow too. He sang all the things into the world - the rivers, the lakes, the swamps and so on and so on(the list is very long and complicated).” -Jarno (37)

IF YOU THOUGHT Argentina’s gift to the world was Maradona, tango or perhaps beef, you thought wrong. I hereby introduce you to the alfajor.

Admittedly these delicacies are also found in other Latin American countries, but nowhere else do you find people as passionate about these wee confectionaries as in Argentina – and Argentines do like to claim these treats as their own invention.