“The Things We Are Made Of” exhibitions and a series of events that relates to the chemical components of the periodic table that constitutes the physical human body and its emotional relation to its environment through these elements.

WAMx: The Things We Are Made Of

  • 28.2.–23.8.2020
    Sencer Vardarman: Under the Mother Earth’s Skin
  • 28.8.–1.11.2020
    Elina Vainio: Reset
  • 6.11.2020–31.1.2021
    Ulrike Mohr
  • From 5.2.2021
    Elsa Salonen

While doing that, “The Things We Are Made Of” transgresses the borders between the human body and the nature, thus the ‘good’ old notion of “the other” that is still being kept active in the political spheres. In the times of the political crises where the attention is directed to discriminations and separations; it is, once again, crucial to revisit the similarity – rather than difference – between us, as well as all the parts of the nature. By using the fluid border between all beings of nature, the exhibition tackles with the fact of sameness rather than otherness via technologies of human body, and how it relates itself to the environment on biological, biochemical, neuro-scientific, psychological as well as emotional level.

“The Things We Are Made Of” flourished from the point of the similarities between the human and the ‘other’ elements of nature through DNA structures and chemical elements of the periodic table arranged in order of atomic number. When taking the similarities and the “re”-organisation of the chemical elements that composes human body and the elements of nature into account, we see each formation of the same chemical elements form different beings of nature.

Be it us, the Earth crust, the fruit-fly, the tobacco plant or a piece of meteorite, we are all composed of the 118 chemical elements of the periodic table, yet organised in a different order. Even though it appears to be different how we relate to life itself, we all have a similar pattern of life, perhaps with a 0.01% difference. Within this perspective, “The Things We Are Made Of” invites artists who are working with these chemical elements in their pure forms where the emotional charges around these elements’ bonds to the course of life. 

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