Petri Saarikko works as a visual media artist and is based in Helsinki. Lullaby Nest marks a new chapter in the artists’ ongoing Remedies series, begun in 2010 to explore diverse approaches to healing in different geographical and cultural contexts. In collaboration with musician Matshidiso, the artists consider the age-old tradition of the lullaby within the context of upholding time and space for rest and sleep. The intimate gesture of caretaking and soothing a child to sleep is an ancient, inherited knowledge deeply embedded in human experience. Spanning across cultures, lullabies share similar melodic, structural and rhythmic patterns – gentle, repetitive and reassuring in tone – which slow down heart and respiration rates in children and adults alike. Regardless of the language, lullabies hold the calming, hypnotic characteristics which can soothe a child to sleep.

Sasha Huber (b. 1975) is a Helsinki-based internationally recognised visual artist-researcher of Swiss-Haitian heritage. Huber’s work is concerned with the politics of memory, care and belonging in relation to colonial residues left in the environment. Connecting history and the present, she uses and responds to archival material within a layered creative practice that encompasses performance-based reparative interventions, video, photography, and collaborations.

Huber also usurps the staple gun, aware of its symbolic significance as a weapon, while offering the potential to renegotiate unequal power dynamics and the possibility of repair, symbolically stitching colonial
wounds together.

She holds an MA in visual culture from Aalto University in Helsinki and is presently undertaking a practice-based PhD in artistic research at the Zurich University of the Arts. Huber also works in a creative partnership with visual artist Petri Saarikko. From 2021–24 her work has been touring under the title “You Name It” which was circulated by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto.