HELSINKI, FINLAND — October 31, 2026. An extraordinary exhibition at Finland’s Ateneum Art Museum is challenging established narratives of modern art by revealing how generations of Nordic women artists explored spirituality, mysticism and the unseen dimensions of human existence. Titled Arcana Borealis – Northern Women and Esotericism, the exhibition brings together more than 200 works by approximately 50 artists, offering a new perspective on the relationship between artistic creation, alternative belief systems and cultural identity from the nineteenth century to the present.
Presented by the Finnish National Gallery, the exhibition opened on October 23 and will remain on display until February 28, 2027. Its title combines two Latin terms: arcana, referring to hidden knowledge or mysteries, and borealis, meaning northern. Together, they evoke a cultural and intellectual landscape in which artists sought to understand realities extending beyond the boundaries of conventional observation.
The exhibition is described by its organizers as the first large-scale museum presentation examining the relationship between Northern women artists and esoteric traditions. Its geographical scope extends across the Nordic countries and Sápmi, the cultural homeland of the Indigenous Sámi people, whose historical territory crosses parts of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Russia.
Among the participating artists are Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, symbolist artist Tyra Kleen, Finnish creator Tove Jansson and several lesser-known figures whose contributions have received comparatively limited attention in conventional art-historical narratives.
Their works demonstrate how spiritual inquiry influenced artistic experimentation, sometimes encouraging creators to abandon realistic representation in favor of symbolic imagery, geometric structures, unconventional materials and abstract compositions.
The exhibition also challenges the tendency to explain modern artistic innovation primarily through the achievements of celebrated male artists. Marja Lahelma, chief curator at Ateneum and co-curator of the exhibition, argues that traditional art history has frequently emphasized the concept of individual male genius while overlooking women’s contributions and the collaborative relationships that shaped artistic development.
This approach invites visitors to reconsider how cultural achievements are documented, attributed and preserved. Artistic innovation does not always emerge through isolated individual effort; it can also develop through communities, shared intellectual traditions and the transmission of knowledge across generations.
Hilma af Klint represents an especially significant figure in this reassessment. Her work has become increasingly prominent in discussions about the origins of abstract painting, particularly because she produced ambitious nonrepresentational compositions influenced by spiritual ideas before abstraction became widely established within European modernism.
Af Klint’s paintings frequently incorporated geometric arrangements, symbolic colors and forms connected to her spiritual investigations. Her work demonstrates that the historical development of abstraction cannot be understood exclusively through formal experimentation or the artistic movements traditionally associated with major European cultural centers.
Other participating artists explored related questions through different visual languages. Tyra Kleen incorporated symbolic and mythological imagery into her compositions, while Tove Jansson, internationally recognized as the creator of the Moomins, also produced paintings reflecting atmospheric landscapes, ambiguity and imaginative environments.
The exhibition includes Kleen’s Forbidden Fruit from 1909 and Jansson’s Mysterious Landscape, dating from the 1930s. These works illustrate different approaches to the relationship between visible reality and symbolic interpretation, demonstrating that spiritual or mysterious themes could be expressed through figurative as well as abstract art.
Importantly, the curatorial approach does not treat all participating artists as members of a single philosophical movement. Esotericism encompasses diverse traditions and practices, including spiritualism, Theosophy and other forms of alternative spiritual inquiry. Their influence varied according to each artist’s historical circumstances, personal beliefs and creative methods.
The distinction is essential because the exhibition examines how spiritual ideas influenced artistic expression rather than presenting supernatural claims as scientifically established facts.
Artistic engagement with the invisible can be understood through questions involving mortality, consciousness, nature, identity and the limitations of human perception. Such subjects have appeared throughout cultural history, frequently providing artists with opportunities to explore experiences that conventional representation cannot easily communicate.
The exhibition further expands the meaning of artistic practice by incorporating textiles, ceramics, metal engravings, stained glass and mosaics alongside painting and other established museum media.
This diversity challenges the traditional hierarchy separating fine art from craftsmanship. Historically, activities such as weaving, embroidery and decorative production were frequently associated with domestic labor and women’s cultural roles, sometimes receiving less institutional recognition than painting or sculpture.
By presenting these techniques within a major national museum, Arcana Borealis emphasizes the intellectual and aesthetic significance of practices that have long contributed to cultural continuity.
Nina Kokkinen, a researcher at the University of Turku and co-curator of the exhibition, has highlighted how the project questions conventional distinctions between artistic objects and the processes through which they are created. From this perspective, the act of making can carry symbolic and communal significance alongside the finished work.
The transmission of knowledge between generations of women is particularly important. Skills developed through textile production and other forms of craftsmanship were often passed down through families and communities, creating systems of cultural learning that did not necessarily depend on formal academic institutions.
This intergenerational dimension becomes especially significant in the presentation of Sámi duodji, the Indigenous tradition of craftsmanship incorporating practical knowledge, environmental relationships and cultural values.
Within Sámi communities, traditional craft practices can involve understandings of materials, landscape and inherited techniques that are inseparable from broader cultural identity. Their inclusion expands the exhibition beyond established European art-historical frameworks and acknowledges forms of knowledge maintained through Indigenous traditions.
The incorporation of these works also raises questions about how museums represent cultural heritage. Indigenous craftsmanship cannot be fully understood solely as decorative production, because its meaning may depend on the relationships between makers, communities, natural resources and the cultural settings in which objects are created and used.
The exhibition’s treatment of spirituality adds another dimension to these questions. Some historical artists described their creative processes as being guided by spirits, angels or forces associated with nature. Such accounts offer insight into the beliefs and intellectual environments influencing their work, even though they do not establish the existence of the supernatural entities described.
Rather than evaluating those claims through the standards of scientific verification, the exhibition examines their cultural and historical significance. Spiritual beliefs can influence artistic choices, collective identities and the development of symbolic systems regardless of whether their underlying metaphysical propositions are demonstrable.
This distinction allows the museum to explore esotericism as a subject of cultural research without confusing artistic interpretation with empirical evidence.
The timing of Arcana Borealis has also attracted attention because its themes coincide with Halloween and Finland’s historical autumn tradition known as Kekri. Associated with seasonal transition, harvest and remembrance of the dead, Kekri provides a cultural reference for examining the relationship between darkness, mortality and spiritual imagination.
Lahelma has suggested that the exhibition’s exploration of light and darkness offers an especially appropriate experience during this period of the year. Within the works presented, darkness is not necessarily associated with fear; it can also represent uncertainty, introspection and the search for forms of knowledge considered hidden or inaccessible.
Such interpretations extend beyond religious belief. Artists have frequently used ambiguous imagery to communicate experiences involving memory, grief, transformation and the unknown, subjects that remain relevant across different cultural and historical contexts.
The exhibition also reflects a wider transformation within museums and cultural institutions. Curators and researchers are increasingly reassessing established collections to identify artists and creative practices that were marginalized by earlier classification systems.
This reassessment does not require rejecting the achievements of previously recognized artists. Instead, it expands the historical framework by examining additional participants, intellectual influences and forms of collaboration that contributed to the development of modern culture.
The recognition of women artists working with spiritual and esoteric themes is especially consequential because their contributions sometimes fell outside the categories through which modernism was traditionally explained.
By bringing together works produced across more than a century, the Finnish National Gallery demonstrates that the relationship between artistic innovation and spiritual inquiry was neither geographically isolated nor restricted to a single generation.
The exhibition also illustrates the importance of interdisciplinary research. Understanding its works requires perspectives drawn from art history, religious studies, cultural anthropology and the study of traditional craftsmanship. These disciplines provide complementary approaches to interpreting the relationships between artistic expression and the beliefs or social structures surrounding it.
For contemporary audiences, Arcana Borealis offers an opportunity to examine how cultural assumptions influence perceptions of artistic importance. The distinction between recognized masterpieces and overlooked works often reflects historical patterns of institutional access, critical attention and preservation rather than artistic quality alone.
The exhibition’s broader significance lies in its reconsideration of authorship, heritage and the meaning of creative knowledge. It invites visitors to recognize that artistic development has depended on more diverse intellectual traditions and social relationships than conventional histories have sometimes acknowledged.
At a time when contemporary societies frequently associate progress with technological innovation, the project also emphasizes the continuing relevance of inherited skills, symbolic imagination and cultural memory.
The works assembled in Helsinki reveal that attempts to understand existence, mortality and the invisible have long provided artists with creative possibilities, even when their interpretations differed substantially from dominant scientific or philosophical perspectives.
Ultimately, Arcana Borealis is not simply an exhibition about mysticism or unconventional belief systems. It is an examination of how women across Northern Europe contributed to artistic innovation while navigating cultural traditions, spiritual interests and institutional structures that often limited recognition of their achievements.
By bringing those contributions into a major museum setting, the exhibition expands the understanding of modern art and challenges visitors to reconsider whose knowledge, experiences and creative practices have shaped its history.
Phoenix24: Beyond the headline, the context. / Más allá del titular, el contexto.