Malva celebrates its fifth anniversary in 2027 with play, art treasures, and the world of smell

Malva will celebrate its fifth anniversary in April 2027. The jubilee year opens with a new exhibition exploring the museum’s collections through the theme of play. In spring, five works by Helene Schjerfbeck will go on display at Malva on loan from the Nordea Art Foundation Finland. In summer, internationally renowned olfactory artist Sissel Tolaas will invite visitors to experience the museum through an entirely new sensory dimension.

Playfully – Peeks into the Collections

Have you ever built a hut in the woods or wondered who lives beneath a mushroom? Have you invented your own rules for a game, or even your own language? If you were to paint the horizon, what colours would you choose?

Malva’s new collection exhibition invites visitors to explore the power of play through art. It examines how artists depict play, engage with it, and push its boundaries. Play opens up creative ways of exploring the world, imagining things differently, and challenging our perceptions of reality.

In a spirit of curiosity and discovery, the exhibition transports visitors to forests, sandpits, circuses and waterside settings, opening up a world full of surprises. It explores play as a fundamental human impulse that shapes our relationships with others and with the world around us. Visitors are invited to play alone or together, join in games of hide-and-seek, and let their imaginations – and their playful, quirky sides – run wild.

The exhibition brings together works from Malva’s art and poster collections, placing them in dialogue to offer fresh perspectives on the theme of play. Most date from the 2000s, alongside a selection of older works from the late twentieth century. One of the oldest is Lake Keitele (1905) by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, a jewel of the Malva collection, presented as part of an ensemble exploring play in and around water. The exhibition features numerous works by artists from the Päijät-Häme region, while the poster collection adds a more international perspective.

– It has been great fun to explore Malva’s extensive art and poster collections through the lens of play. We have enjoyed examining many of the works with fresh eyes and look forward to seeing how visitors respond to them and interpret them through the theme of play, say exhibition curator Kukka Pitkänen and collection curators Hanna Suihko, Liisa Mäkitalo and Susanna Korhonen.
 
Visitors can also try their hand at poster design using the unique Poster Machine. Designs created by visitors will be displayed on the gallery wall as part of the exhibition.

The exhibition has no age limits: everyone deserves the chance to play and enjoy art!

Playfully – Peeks into the Collections is on display from 16.4.2027 in the Brewery Galleries on the 1st floor.

Since Malva opened, Roots – Treasures from the Collections has offered a permanent display of highlights from its art, poster, and design collections.

Roots celebrates Lahti’s heritage. Its visual identity and architecture were designed by Lahti-based designer and interior architect Tapio Anttila. The exhibition explores the legacy of Lahti’s furniture industry from the 1950s to the 1970s and showcases poster art promoting local brands such as Mallasjuoma and Asko, as well as the Salpausselkä Games. It also traces the history of Lahti Art Museum through highlights from the collection of the Vyborg Art Museum, which were evacuated during the Second World War and later divided between Lahti and Hämeenlinna.

Roots will remain on display until 15 August 2027, after which the fifth-floor gallery will host temporary exhibitions.

Sissel Tolaas

Sissel Tolaas is a Norwegian-born artist and researcher known for her work with the sense of smell. In 2027, she will present her first major project in Finland. Centred on a large-scale exhibition at Malva, the project reimagines the museum as a living organism in which bodies, architecture, atmosphere and the environment continuously affect one another.

Challenging the dominance of vision in contemporary culture, Tolaas creates a sensory, embodied experience. The exhibition approaches emotional intelligence (EI) not simply as an individual psychological skill, but as a shared condition shaped by air, temperature, smell, proximity, movement, and the presence of other bodies.

The project draws on sauna culture and the history of Malva’s building as a former brewery, exploring fermentation and sweating as parallel biological processes. It also builds on architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s legacy by extending his vision of architecture as a sensory continuation of the human body.

– The project approaches emotional intelligence (EI) as a capacity shaped by environmental and social conditions. Knowledge is not only presented for observation; it is encountered through breathing, sensing, moving, resting, and participating. The museum thus becomes an active sensory and social environment – a form of public infrastructure for emotional calibration, collective awareness, and non-verbal connection, Tolaas describes.
 
For more than three decades, Tolaas has radically expanded the role of smell within contemporary art, culture, and science. Her work demonstrates that smell is neither secondary nor merely decorative, but a precise instrument of knowledge: a form of communication, an archive of lived experience, an indicator of environmental change, and a powerful carrier of cultural memory.

The project is being developed in collaboration with EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art. Malva will serve as its main venue, hosting Tolaas’s large-scale solo exhibition, while a complementary spatial intervention at EMMA will explore aspects of the project within a different architectural and institutional setting.

Sissel Tolaas is on display in the 1st and 3rd floor galleries 28.5.–31.10.2027.

Schjerfbeck X Nordea Art Foundation Finland

This mini-exhibition features five works by one of Finland’s most celebrated artists, Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946). All five are on loan from the Nordea Art Foundation Finland.

Spanning different stages of the artist’s career, the works in Schjerfbeck X Nordea Art Foundation Finland trace the evolution of her distinctive style, from nineteenth-century naturalism and history painting towards an increasingly pared-down modernism. As her work evolved, narrative content gradually gave way to a purely painterly approach, with growing emphasis on the unity of surfaces, lines and tonal variations.

The Nordea Art Foundation Finland’s collection has been built up by Nordea and its predecessor banks. Building on a tradition spanning more than a century, the Foundation recognises art and banking history not only as part of our shared cultural heritage, but also for their contribution to learning, intellectual life, and the enrichment of society.

Schjerfbeck X Nordea Art Foundation Finland is on display in the Cellar Gallery 20.4.–6.6.2027.

Further information

Playfully – Peeks into the Collections
Exhibition Curator Kukka Pitkänen, kukka.pitkanen@lahti.fi, 044 482 0899
Sissel Tolaas
Exhibition Curator Ilari Laamanen, ilari.laamanen@lahti.fi, 044 483 1993
Schjerfbeck X Nordea Art Foundation Finland
Nordea Art Foundation Finland, Executive Director Anu Kehusmaa, anu.kehusmaa@consult.nordea.com, 041 437 7566
Head of Exhibitions Päivi Roivainen, paivi.roivainen@lahti.fi, 044 483 1942