Et le passé revit le temps d’une visite

Et le passé revit le temps d’une visite (English: And the Past Comes Back to Life During a Visit) is a multidisciplinary project created by composer Walter Sallinen and visual artist Markus Jäntti between 2017 and 2022. The concept is based on the origins of Modest Mussorgsky’s 1874 piano composition Pictures at an Exhibition, in which Mussorgsky responded to his visit to an exhibition of works by the painter Viktor Hartmann.

Jäntti constructed an exhibition for Sallinen consisting of ten visual works, whose artistic points of departure were the verbal descriptions associated with Mussorgsky’s piano composition. Sallinen composed a ten-part work based on this exhibition visit and the impressions it evoked.

“Sallinen discovers a drawing of a garden gnome on a cardboard display hidden in the basement boiler room. However, the gnome’s hat is not pointed as usual, rather shaped like a suction plug directed upwards, which in turn is somewhat reminiscent of Richard Wagner’s oversized beret. In Mussorgski’s piece, the gnome; in Jäntti’s piece, the mutated garden gnome; in Sallinen’s piece, the stomping sample sound of an idea of German folk schlager chased through Euro-trash techno...”

— Jörg Heiser

The installation at Ahjo Exhibition Space at Espoo Cultural Centre can be seen as a revisitation of Sallinen’s original exhibition visit. It brings together visual and sound works created during the course of the project, a documentary video work, and an art publication produced as part of the project.

Markus Jäntti is a Finnish-born visual artist, living and working in a three year residency in Vasa, Finland, supported by Pro Artibus Foundation. He graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the Berlin University of the Arts under Professor Robert Lucander and participated in the Hunter College “Studio Art” Master Program in New York. He has been awarded, among others, the Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium des Landes Berlin and the Finnish Art Society’s young artistgrant. He worked 2022-2026 as a visiting lecturer in painting at the Berlin University of the Arts and is a lecturer in art pedagogy at Uniarts Helsinki since 2026.

Walter Sallinen is a Helsinki-based composer and sound artist. Sallinen's work spans from spatial and installative sound rituals to graphically notated performances and acousmatic compositions. His artistic practice explores the potential of interdisciplinarity as a compositional tool for unforeseen collaborative concepts. In recent years, Sallinen's work has centered around a search for the affected surplus and sublimity in contemporary sonorities both as a reaction and a reflection to an all too hyper-normalised reality.

Et le passé revit le temps d’une visite | Exhibition Space AHJO

25 September – 20 December 2026

Free admission

The exhibition is open to the public during the opening hours of the Cultural Centre: Mon–Fri 8 am–8 pm, Sat 9 am–6 pm, and Sun when events are taking place.