Platform

15/10/2026

Platform proudly presents our artists in residence for 2027 and the theme Loosey Goosey 🦆. Swipe to learn more about the artists goosing around with us next year!

Christine Lykkeh is a Danish, mixed media artist working with painting, felting, ceramics, and zines. Her practice explores themes of destiny, collective movement and our connection to the past through tales and myths. Visually, she is drawing inspiration from a rural upbringing on a farm in Fyn, where troll folklore, horse rituals and moss-green wetlands thrive. She has developed a symbolic visual language rooted in myth and inherited narratives. Her work considers how these stories persist and transform over time, offering frameworks to navigate an unstable present and to envision what might unfold ahead.

Photo: Mio Voisin Mio Voisin

Dafni Melidou is an artist and educator at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Her artistic practice questions dominant systems through multidisciplinary work that presents overlooked non-mainstream narratives. Very often she investigates smell as a socio-political tool, using it to expose social and ecological injustices. By treating smell as an artistic medium rather than an aesthetic one, she creates work that often address the erasure of this form of intangible heritage, the discrimination inherent in modern hygiene standards, and broader contemporary sensory biopolitics.

Presley Ziogas (Kāi Tahu) is a q***r Māori movement artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. Her choreographic practice is informed by her own q***r and Indigenous experiences, exploring the relationship between the everyday and the surreal. Through site-specific work in natural environments, lo-fi aesthetics and reanimated popular culture references, she creates work that feels familiar and accessible while approaching grief, mortality, death and softness. Her work finds beauty in the ordinary and the fleeting.

Lars Jonsson, 1990(SE). I work with thoughts, ideas and loose wordplays about structures related to identity, masculinity, sports and nostalgia. In that process, humor often appears as a tap dance between irony and sincerity, or a starting point for how something can be interpret

02/10/2026

Welcome to our cozy stitching circle 💚

Come join us for an afternoon of good vibes, creativity and chatting.
Bring your current project, whether it is knitting, crochet, embroidery or something else entirely. All skill leves and styles are welcome.

The stitching circle is also a great chance to see Liiactuelle's fiber arts exhibition "bury my body in the forest".🌿

Where? Platform, Vaasa
When? Saturday 3 October, 14.00-18.00

Feel free to bring drinks or snacks.
Tea and coffee will be served.

28/09/2026

As liactuallee’s residency is soon ending with us - culminating in the exhibition "bury my body in a finnish forest - a forestpunk exhibition" this Wednesday we asked them about their time here ✨️

Q1: What influences your work?

A1: My surroundings, the natural world, and literature. In Vaasa, this has included the forests, the landscape, and the sheep I’ve met.

Q2: Have you noticed something new in your practice during your residency at Platform?

A2: I’ve been actively trying to make more time to be human: to rest, walk, bicycle, eat well, and simply be present. Although it is hard to stop producing when your nervous system is wired towards work work and only work.

Q3: Have you learned something new during your residency?

A3: I’ve learned about berry and mushroom picking, sauna culture, Finnish mythology, Korsnäs sweater techniques, and wet felting.

I’ve also realised that I am incapable of disconnecting from the politics and upheavals happening back home, and the last three months have been especially potent for thinking about rebellion.

Q4: What questions or themes are you currently working with?

A4: What does it mean to have access to forests and natural spaces, without the constant threat of trees being cut down in the name of development? I’m thinking about the privilege of being able to walk and bicycle freely, and how I might bring some of that experience back home.

Q5: How has the change of environment influenced your work?

A5: It has influenced my colour palette, a shift that was already happening but became much more pronounced here. I’ve been drawn to the muted yet magnificent landscape of Ostrobothnia, and to working with more natural, locally connected materials, particularly wool. The slower pace here has also given me more space to observe, experiment, and let the work develop without forcing it.

24/09/2026

25/08/2026

THIS SATURDAY 29.8. 19:00 AT PLATFORM; The Mother Age - a feature documentary.

Irene Kaltenborn invites us on a richly philosophical and sensory journey of
(re)discovery in the deep Finnish forests. Taking the creation myth of the Finnish and Karelian national epic, The Kalevala, as a starting point - where
the world emerges not through conquest but through song and organic becoming - ”The Mother Age” reflects on alternative origins for
human culture.

Director: Irene M. Kaltenborn
Producer: Irene M. Kaltenborn
Co-producer: Margo Peegel
Production Company: Vidåpne Øyne
Cinematography: Margo Peegel & Irene M. Kaltenborn
Music: Lauri Pälomaki & Sipo Herva

Year: 2026
Country: Norway & Sweden
Language: English, Finnish & Norwegian
Runtime: 75 min

With Support From
FilmCentrum Syd
Swedish Arts Council
Arts Council Norway
Helge Ax:son Johnsons stiftelse
Inter Arts Center
FABRIKKEN for Kunst og Design
Norwegian Film Institute
Fritt Ord

18/08/2026

Hannah Hoebeke has been artist in residence at Platform and now her time with us has come to an end! We asked her some questions about her work and time here with us ✨️

Q1: What influences your work?
A1: My work is strongly influenced by encounters with people. I use sculpture to facilitate these encounters, the act of sculpting itself becomes a platform for conversation, a way to get to know another person's world, someone I wouldn't normally come into contact with.

Q2: Have you noticed something new in your practice during your residency at Platform?
A2: During my residency at Platform, I wanted to challenge my practice around accessibility. I often work with groups who don't have direct contact with the art world, and I wanted to push that accessibility further by making my practice hyper-mobile, so people wouldn't have to feel the threshold of a gallery, but instead I could meet them in a place that matters to them, where they feel comfortable. That's how I started developing a sculpting trolley that fits on my bike, is lightweight, and can be disassembled, so I could bring the project directly to people.

Q3: Have you learned something new during your residency?
A3: The residency was a new step for me in terms of engaging people in dialogue based on location. In the past, I would start conversations at someone's workplace or in the studio, but this time, because I could be so mobile, I started the dialogue before the encounter even began, by asking people to take me to a place that mattered to them. That immediately opened up the conversation, and through this approach I was able to create a subjective map of Vaasa.

Q4: What questions or themes are you currently working with?
A4: I'm working strongly around the role of community work within the art world, and how we can make it genuinely accessible — but also around the role of sculpture, which historically served as a propaganda tool for the ruling class. I'm interested in transforming that away from emperors and kings, and instead using the status of sculpture to represent unseen communities and labor.

Q5: How did the change of environment influence your work?
A5: Until now I've worked mostly in urban

07/08/2026

24/07/2026

Welcome to eat a warm bowl of soup and listen to the artist-talk by artists Hanna Hoebeke Hannah Hoebeke and artist Li Actuallee Li

Thursday 30th of August at 18:00
Kyrkoesplanaden 20D

What is Cultural Soup?
Cultural Soup is an event where we invite the public to come eat soup together at Platform. Cultural Soup is held when a new artist ha arrived at the residency and the artist holds an artist-talk or presentation. The talk/ presentation is held in english.
The event is free and open to everyone, artists, cultural workers, someone who is interested in art or someone who just want to have a bowl of soup :)

Meet the artists:
Hanna Hoebeke is an artist from Ghent, Belgium, whose sculptures capture both personal and collective encounters. She transforms lightweight, everyday objects and people into solid clay forms, bridging the gap between the familiar and the unknown. With its strong physical presence, sculpture offers a unique way to foster interaction. Its ability to occupy space invites engagement, creates shared experiences, and brings people together—turning its tangible nature into a means of connection. Although her activism is not explicitly embedded in her work, it subtly informs her practice, reflecting daily life and interactions. Her sculptures embody the tension between the familiar and the unknown.

Li Actuallee Through repetitive gestures—whether a loop, stitch, or mark— Li constructs environments that evolve through re-articulation. Grounded in hope and utopian visions, their work honors the value of natural resources, including human labor. Repetition becomes a way to expand visual storytelling, connecting craft, q***rness, and ecology.
The Stitchpunk Manifesto begins with a simple but urgent principle: Mend and repair. Embrace upcycling and repurposing. It insists on using what is available to extend the life of objects, refusing the logic of waste. In a world shaped by speed and abandonment, I return to slowness, to attention, to the ethics of restoration. These values are not only conceptual but material 4 they guide my every gesture, each knot and thread, each choice to repair instead of discard.