Sara Bjarland (b.1981, Helsinki) is a Finnish artist based in Amsterdam. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2007 and in 2012-2013 she participated in the studio programme at Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Ghent. Recent exhibitions include ‘What My Hands Know’ at Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam (2023), ‘Deposits’ at Sculptor Gallery in Helsinki (2022), ‘with Love’, curated by Maria Ragnestam, Museum Anna Nordlander in Skellefteå, ‘Constant Eruptions’ at Hopstreet Gallery, Brussels (2020) and “Crumple, fail, faint, fall’ at Galleri Sinne, Helsinki (2020), ‘Uncertainty and Ground Conditions’ at DASH, Kortrijk (2019). In 2020 she received the William Thuring award from the Finnish Arts Association and in 2019 she was one of the five short listed artists for Below Zero Prize for Finnish artists (initiated by the Finnish Institute in London). Her work has been acquired by Kiasma Museum for Contemporary Art (Helsinki), The Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation (Helsinki) and several private collections in Belgium, Finland and The Netherlands.

Artist Statement

In my work I use discarded materials and objects to materially think through and reflect on my experience of the world around me and the legacy that current generations are leaving on the planet. For my sculptures and installations, I collect broken, dirty or half decayed objects I find in my urban surroundings, along the roadside or at recycling facilities. I am interested in these as remnants of today’s consumer oriented society and as carriers of meaning. I’m also interested in the concept of liminality in relation to these materials, and how objects which are dirty or decaying can be unsettling or uncanny because they linger in between the recognisable and the unknown, between the dirty and the clean, between having had a function and being useless, or between the living and the non-living. In my exhibitions I often imagine a post-human world, where the remnants are witnesses of a time that has passed, sometimes even taking on a new life.