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.

Dan-Olof Riska has worked in physics for 40 years. In a distinguished international career which saw him hold an Assistant Professorship in the USA at the age of 27, he is now Director of the Helsinki Institute of Physics and vice-chairman of CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research based near Geneva.

SIX DEGREES met with Riska at the Physics Campus in Helsinki’s Kumpula district for a chat about the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

How did you first become interested in physics, and what impact has it had in your life?

Bottling her talent for the 
Finnish pop audience

CHISU has officially arrived on the Finnish pop music scene. Her sophomore album, Vapaa ja yksin (Free and Alone), is undoubtedly one of the freshest-sounding Finnish pop albums of this year. With her mature and poetic lyrics touching on a diversity of topics such as the recession, unemployment, depression and even swine flu, the Finnish public are sitting up and taking notice of the artist formally known as Christel Sundberg.

Singer-songwriter Manna has all the makings of a pop star:
looks, talent and guts. A lot of that stems from her Finnish-Algerian family background.

Things are looking up for Manna. Released at the end of September, her second album Songs of Hope and Desire has already received a full set of rave reviews and gotten decent exposure. Though things have changed in the Finnish music industry, it’s still far from easy for a Finnish indie rock record with English lyrics to get noticed.

Helsinki-based Ugandan designer Lincoln Kayiwa creates beautiful solutions to daily problems.

I first saw the work of Lincoln Kayiwa in the Master of Arts exhibition in 2008. I was immediatelytaken with his aesthetic and unctional sterling silver Tukaani chopsticks, designed for the more butterfingered western consumers of Asian food. Easy to use and beautiful to behold, it is indicative of the kind of approach to design Kayiwa cultivates, from his Rose wine glass to the playful Dino clothes rack.

With two albums of piano-driven pop songs, singer-songwriter Astrid Swan has gone from a sassy indie princess to an edgy and ambitious artist. Now she wants to have a bit of fun and make music that the world would hear.

Four years ago Astrid Swan broke into the Finnish music scene as a solo artist with a most auspicious beginning. Her debut album Poverina caused ripples on both sides of the Atlantic and established her as the piano-stroking girl poet with an edge. On the follow- up, Spartan Picnic, Swan transformed into something altogether more mercenary. The belligerent and severe album earned her again more praise and more forays abroad.

Umayya Abu-Hanna is a Palestinian migrant who after 28 years in Finland has not gotten any closer to becoming a Finn. An outspoken advocate of cultural diversity, a writer, journalist, a single mother and now an adviser for the National Gallery, her appetite for making a difference has not abated.

To call Umayya Abu-Hanna opinionated is like saying Che Guevara was “left-leaning.” A Palestinian by birth and raised in Israel in a virtual mélange of cultures, she has become a highly visible – and vocal – character in her adopted country.

SixDegrees met Charles Lawrence, world traveller, former psychologist and businessman whose life took a new course when he experienced a paranormal event. He was adopted and baptized by the Hopi Indians some 20 years ago. The spokesman of the native thought came to Finland for the celebration of the Finnish association “Four Winds”.

IT ALL started from a bottle of shampoo. The 20-year-old South Korean Aamu Song was interrailing in Scandinavia in 1994. During the trip this industrial design student travelled to the very north of Finland,...