Art for All Festival: Consumed
This is a video installation piece for the Art For All Festival 2025, held in Itäkeskus, Helsinki. The festival’s theme Success & Glory reflects on money, consumerism, and what success means in contemporary society. Through the theme the festival explores narratives and ideals in a
society that pushes individualism, competition, and constant
self-development. The art festival takes over the shopping center Easton Hansakäytävä in Itäkeskus, filling the empty commercial spaces with art.
Consumed is a piece that showcases the evolution from an bird’s eye view, of the sometimes unstoppable need to keep consuming. The central piece is the Easton semi-empty shopping mall.
Many problems in our modern world can be attributed to a single
root: unrestricted consumption, which is encouraged and fundamentally
necessary for the current form of Capitalism. The shopping mall, for
him, is a symbol of wasteful city planning, where new venues, metro
stations and residential areas catalyse the emergence of shopping malls,
even adjacent to existing ones.
The digitally created video work raises the question how much more are
we going to build until it's enough? In the video the uncontrollable
growth of shopping centers, driven by frenzy for over-consumption is
seen through an amalgamation of images and maps from Eastern Helsinki
and simulated geometry.
Photos by Konsta Klemetti and
Siavash Minaravesh