Until August 31, MUU Contemporary Art Centre in Helsinki, Finland, presents A Thousand Plateaus—a solo exhibition by Lana Haga exhibiting a multidimensional installation of sculptures, reliefs, and sound that foregrounds transformation as both a formal and philosophical concern. Working primarily with post-industrial plastic, cotton twine, oil paint, and mirror, Haga constructs a tactile ecology of works that blur the line between synthetic and organic, structure and collapse. The exhibition borrows its title from Deleuze and Guattari’s 1980 publication A Thousand Plateaus, with the concept of the rhizome serving as a point of orientation.
The rhizome, as a structure that grows laterally without a central hierarchy, offers a model for Haga’s process-based practice: her works emerge through intuitive movement across materials, with ideas taking shape in the folds of process rather than through linear progression. Reliefs like To Love Another: That is Perhaps the Most Difficult of All Our Tasks, forming a wall sculpture in a delicate pink gradient, seem to echo this approach—built from cotton twine and oil paint, the work evokes fragility, endurance, and intimacy through its quiet palette and layered textures. Referencing Rilke, the piece gestures to the emotional labour of connection, while its surface suggests both topography and wound. Sound also plays an integral role in A Thousand Plateaus. An audio composition by French artist Fayf Abad permeates the space, layering field recordings and modulated frequencies to create a meditative sonic field. The sound piece mirrors the show’s recurring motifs—layering, shifting, dissolving—and provides an aural texture that heightens the immersive nature of the installation. Sound here operates like a material: vibrating, connecting, activating.
The exhibition also features sculptural works built from recycled industrial plastic. In Whole Lotta Love (2024), a composition of plastic granulate and acrylic pulses with formal tension. Fragmented but cohesive, it reflects Haga’s interest in material resilience and emotional force. Imagined Lifeform in a Reality Not Too Far Away II (2022) continues this investigation, its soft-edged silhouette recalling speculative biology and synthetic mutation. The REBIRTH series, to which this piece belongs, approaches plastic as both artefact and afterlife—relics of fossilized pasts that morph into unrecognizable futures. These forms resist utopia, embracing ambiguity and imperfection as inherent traits of transformation. Throughout the show, recurring contrasts emerge: between rigidity and softness, permanence and erosion, construction and decay. Surfaces shimmer or rupture, materials stretch or compress, and forms hover between the familiar and the invented. These oppositions—material and thematic—invite viewers into a space where becoming is both personal and planetary, fragile and persistent. Within the layered logic of A Thousand Plateaus, Haga offers a sculptural terrain that resists categorisation, echoing the nonlinear growth of the rhizome itself.
For more information, please consult MUU Contemporary Art Centre here.
Last Updated on August 20, 2025
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About the author:
Maxim Foucquet is a curator, art critic, and contemporary artist residing and working in Belgium.
